The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies

Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [iv]

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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 end p.iv Top

Privacy Policy and Legal Notice © Oxford University Press, 2003-2011. All rights reserved. Acknowledgements Many people have helped to bring this volume to press. We are grateful to our essayists for their generosity, their patience and efficiency, and for the consistent excellence that characterizes the writings of this Handbook. We are deeply indebted to Samantha Papaioannou, whose skillful editing wove the pieces into a well-integrated whole. Brown

University, and especially Professor Mark Cladis, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, provided critical support both material and moral at crucial stages of the process. We also thank Patrick Owens for his work on the indexes, supported by the Cottrill-Rolfes Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky. At Oxford University Press we have been assisted by a splendid team of editors: Jean van Altena, Tanya Dean, Hilary O'shea, Lucy Qureshi, Dorothy McCarthy, Tom Perridge, Lizzie Robottom, Maggie Shade, and Jennifer Wagstaffe. Our heartfelt thanks go to each and every one of these. It has been a pleasure and an honour to work with such colleagues at every stage of this effort. Finally, we thank our respective spouses and families who have graciously tolerated the distraction of yet another scholarly project. S. A. H. D. G. H. January 2008 end p.v CONTENTS

List of Maps xi

List of Illustrations xii

List of Abbreviations xiv

List of Contributors xxv

Introduction 1 Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter

PART I. PROLEGOMENA

1. From Patristics to Early Christian Studies 7 Elizabeth A. Clark

2. Literature, Patristics, Early Christian Writing 42 Mark Vessey

3. Which Early Christianity? 66 Karen L. King

PART II. EVIDENCE: MATERIAL AND TEXTUAL

4. Material Evidence (1): Archaeology 87 Mark Humphries

5. Material Evidence (2): Visual Culture 104 Robin M. Jensen

6. Epigraphy 120 William Tabbernee

7. Palaeography and Codicology 140 Ralph W. Mathisen end p.vii PART III. IDENTITIES

8. Jews and Christians 169 Andrew S. Jacobs

9. Pagans and Christians 186 Michele R. Salzman

10. ‘Gnosticism’ 203 Antti Marjanen

11. Manichaeism 221 Samuel N. C. Lieu

12. Arius and Arians 237 J. Rebecca Lyman

13. Pelagius and Pelagians 258 Mathijs Lamberigts

PART IV. REGIONS

14. The West (1): Italy, Gaul, and Spain 283 Mark Humphries

15. The West (2): North Africa 303 Éric Rebillard

16. The East (1): Greece and Asia Minor 323 Raymond Van Dam

17. The East (2): Egypt and Palestine 344 David Brakke

18. The East (3): Syria and Mesopotamia 365 Lucas Van Rompay

PART V. STRUCTURES AND AUTHORITIES

19. Clergy and Laity 389 Karen Jo Torjesen

20. The Biblical Canon 406 Michael W. Holmes end p.viii 21. Creeds, Councils, and Canons 427 Everett Ferguson

22. Church and Empire 446 Harold A. Drake

23. Women and Gender 465 Ross Shepard Kraemer

24. Monasticism 493 J. William Harmless, SJ

PART VI. EXPRESSIONS OF CHRISTIAN CULTURE

25. Early Christian Apocryphal Literature 521 Stephen J. Shoemaker

26. Apologetics 549 Mark Edwards

27. Homiletics 565 Wendy Mayer

28. Early Christian Historians and Historiography 584 William Adler

29. Martyr Passions and Hagiography 603 Susan Ashbrook Harvey

30. Poetry and Hymnography (1): Christian Latin Poetry 628 Michael J. Roberts

31. Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World 641 John A. McGuckin

32. Poetry and Hymnography (3): Syriac 657 Sebastian P. Brock

33. Christian Philosophy 672 Hubertus R. Drobner

PART VII. RITUAL, PIETY, AND PRACTICE

34. Christian Initiation 693 Maxwell E. Johnson end p.ix

35. Eucharistic Liturgy 711

Daniel Sheerin

36. Prayer 744 Columba Stewart, OSB

37. Asceticism 764 Rebecca Krawiec

38. Penance 786 Allan D. Fitzgerald, OSA

39. Martyrdom and the Cult of the Saints 808 Richard M. Price

40. Pilgrimage 826 Georgia Frank

PART VIII. THEOLOGICAL THEMES

41. Interpretation of Scripture 845 Frances M. Young

42. Doctrine of God 864 Lewis Ayres and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz

43. Christ and Christologies 886 Brian E. Daley, SJ

44. Doctrine of Creation 906 Paul M. Blowers

45. Early Christian Ethics 932 Francine Cardman

46. Instrumenta Studiorum: Tools of the Trade 957 Joseph F. Kelly and Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent

General Subject Index 979

Index of Persons (Ancient and Modern) 993

Index of Biblical Citations 1017 end p.x List of Maps 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Latin West 282 Roman North Africa 302 Greece and Asia Minor 324 Egypt 342 Palestine 343 Syria and Mesopotamia 364

end p.xi List of Illustrations 6.1. Inscription commemorating Perpetua and other North African martyrs. From Tabbernee 1997: 106. 121 6.2. Epitaph of a Perpetua, sweetest daughter. From Tabbernee 1997: 110. 122 6.3. Rotas/sator palindrome. 129 6.4. Rotas/sator palindrome with tenet forming cross. 130 6.5. Rotas/sator palindrome rearranged to form paternoster. 131 7.1. Palimpsest of Cicero, De Republica. From Steffens 1903: pl. 13. 149 7.2. Capitalis quadrata used in a fourth- or fifth-century copy of Vergil's Aeneid. From Thompson 1894: 185. 150 7.3. Rustic capitals used in the Carmen de bello Actiaco, pre—79 ce from Herculaneum. From Steffens 1910: pl. 3. 151 7.4. Cursive capitals from a wall inscription from Pompeii, first century ce. From Thompson 1894: 206. 152 7.5. New Roman cursive used in an imperial rescript on papyrus dated to the fifth century. From Thompson 1894: 212. 152 7.6. An uncial copy of the book of Acts, chapter 28, from the mid-sixth century. From Thompson 1894: 194. 153 7.7. Half-uncial copy of the In Constantium imperatorem of Hilary of Poitiers, dating to 509/510 ce. From Steffens 1903: no. 17. 153 7.8. Greek cursive papyrus dated to 355 ce; the manumission of a slave. From Thompson 1894: 142. 154 7.9. Greek uncial from the Codex Sinaiticus. From Thompson 1894: 150. 155 7.10. Greek miniscule, a tenth-century copy of Thucydides. From Thompson 1912: pl. 57. 156 7.11. Caroline miniscule, the Rule of St Benedict, from the ninth century. From Steffens 1903: pl. 36. 156

end p.xii 7.12. A section of the seventh-century uncial Codex Amiatinus. From Thompson 1894: 195. 157 22.1. Mosaic of Christ and the apostles that once adorned the walls of the old triclinium of the Lateran palace in Rome. 447 end p.xiii

Abbreviations Periodicals, Series, and Reference Works

ABD Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. D. N. Freedman

ACO Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum

ACW Ancient Christian Writers

AE L'année épigraphique

Aev Aevum: Rassegna de scienza, storiche, linguistiche, e filologiche

AJA American Journal of Archeology

ALMA Archivum Latinitas Medii Aevi

AnBoll Analecta Bollandiana

ANF Ante-Nicene Fathers Series

ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung, ed. H. Temporini and W. Haase. Berlin, 1972–

Aug Augustinianum

AugStud Augustinian Studies

Aug(L) Augustiniana, Leuven

AugLex Augustinus-Lexikon

BA Biblical Archaeologist

BA Bibliothèque Augustinienne

BAR British Archaeological Reports

BETL Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium

BHG Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca

BHL Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina

BHO Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis

BLE Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique

BMCR Bryn Mawr Classical Review

ByF Byzantinische Forschungen

CA Classical Antiquity

CAH Cambridge Ancient History

CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly

CC Corpus Christianorum

CCCM Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis

CCSA Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum end p.xiv

CCSG Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca

CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina

CERP Centre d'études et de recherches pastorales

CFM.A1 Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum, Series Archaeologica 1

CH Church History

Chiron Chiron: Mitteilungen der Kommission für alte Geschichte und Epigraphik des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts

CIG Corpus inscriptionum graecarum, ed. A. Boeckh, 4 vols., Berlin: Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1828–77

CII Corpus inscriptionum iudaicarum, ed. J. B. Frey, 2 vols., Rome: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1936–52

CIL Corpus inscriptionum latinarum, ed. F. W. Ritschl et al., Berlin: Reimer, 1862–1932; de Gruyter, 1932–

CPG Clavis Patrum Graecorum, ed. M. Geerard, 5 vols., Turnhout: Brepols, 1974–87; Supplementum, ed. M. Geerard and J. Noret, Turnhout: Brepols, 1998

CPL Clavis Patrum Latinorum, ed. E. Dekkers, 3rd edn., Turnhout: Brepols, 1995

CQ Classical Quarterly

CRAI Comptes rendus des l'Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres

CS Cistercian Studies Series

CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium

CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum

CWE Collected Works of Erasmus

CWS Classics of Western Spirituality

DACL Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. F. Cabrol and H. Leclercq, 15 vols., Paris: Letouzey et Ané (1907–53)

DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers

DSp Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique, histoire et doctrine, ed. M. Viller, A. Derville, P. Lamarche, and A. Solignac, 22 vols., Paris: Beauchesne, 1932–95

EA Epigraphica Anatolica

ECF Early Church Fathers

ETL Ephemerides theologicae lovanienses

FC Fathers of the Church

FKDG Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

FZPhTh Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie

GCS Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte

GNO Gregorii Nyssensi Opera

GRBS Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies end p.xv HLL Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike

HTR Harvard Theological Review

HTS Harvard Theological Studies

ICUR Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae septimo saeculo antiquiores, ed. J. B. de Rossi, J.-B. and G. Gatti, Rome: Libraria Pontificia and P. Cuggiani 1861–1915

ICUR2 Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae septimo saeculo antiquiores, nova series, ed. A. Silvagni et al., Rome: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1922–92

IGOccidChr Inscriptiones graecae christianae veteres occidentis, ed. C. Wessel, Inscriptiones Christianae Italiae 1, Bari: Edipuglia, 1989

ILCV Inscriptiones latinae christianae veteres, vols. 1–3, ed. E. Diehl, Berlin: Weidmann, 1925–31; vol. 4, ed. J. Moreau and H. I. Marrou, Berlin: Weidmann, 1961

JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion

JAC Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum

JBL Journal of Biblical Literature

JDT Jahrbüch für deutsche Theologie

JECS Journal of Early Christian Studies

JFSR Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

JHSex Journal of the History of Sexuality

JMEMS Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

JRA Journal of Roman Archaeology

JRS Journal of Roman Studies

JSNT Journal for the Study of the New Testament

JSPSup Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha: Supplement Series

JTS Journal of Theological Studies

LCC Library of Christian Classics

LCL Loeb Classical Library

LTK Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche

MFC Message of the Fathers of the Church

Mus Muséon: Revue d'études orientales

NHMS Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies

NHS Nag Hammadi Studies

NPNF1 Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1

NPNF2 Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2

NTS New Testament Studies

OCP Orientalia christiana periodica

OECS Oxford Early Christian Studies

OECT Oxford Early Christian Texts

OHMS Oxford Historical Monograph Series

OrChrAn Orientalia Christiana Analecta end p.xvi Par. Paradosis: Beiträge zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur und Theologie

PCBE Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire, ed. H.-I. Marrou and J.-R. Palanque, i: Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; ii: Rome: École française de Rome, 1999–2000

PG Patrologia Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne

PL Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne

PLRE The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, ed. A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris, 4 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980–92

PLS Patrologiae Latinae Supplementum, ed. A. Hamman, 5 vols., Paris: Garnier, 1958–74

PMS Patristic Monograph Series

PO Patrologia Orientalis

PTS Patristische Texte und Studien

RAC Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum

RB Revue biblique

RBén Revue Bénédictine

REA Revue des études anciennes

REAug Revue des études augustiniennes

RechAug Recherches augustiniennes

RHE Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique

RQ Römische Quartalschrift für christliche

Altertumskunde und für Kirchengeschichte

RSPT Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques

RSR Recherches de science religieuse

RTAM Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale

SAC Studies in Antiquity and Christianity

SacEr Sacris erudiri: Jaarboek voor Godsdienstwetenschappen

SAEMO Sancti Ambrosii Episcopi Mediolanensis Opera

SBL Society for Biblical Literature

SBLTT Society of Biblical Literature Texts and Translations

SC Sources chrétiennes

SCH Studies in Church History

ScrHier Scripta Hierosolymitana

SEG Supplementum epigraphicum graecum, ed. J. J. E. Hondius, Leiden: Nijhof; Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1923–71, 1979–

SO Symbolae osloenses

SPLi Studia Patristica et liturgica

SR Sciences religieuses

StPatr Studia Patristica

StPB Studia post-biblica end p.xvii StStor Studi storici

Suppl. VC Vigiliae Christianae Supplement

TaS Texts and Studies

TRE Theologische Realenzyklopädie

TRu Theologische Rundschau

TS Theological Studies

TU Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristliche Literatur

USQR Union Seminary Quarterly Review

VC Vigiliae Christianae

VetChr Vetera Christianorum

WSA The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Hyde Park, NY: New City Press

WUNT Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament

ZAC Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum

ZDMG Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft

ZKG Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte

ZPE Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik Ancient sources Ambrose of Milan

Ep. Epistulae

Fid. De fide

Hex. Hexaemeron

Off. De officiis

Paen. De paenitentia

Sacr. De sacramentis

Ser. c. Aux. Sermo contra Auxentium Ambrosiaster

Comm. in Rom. (etc.) Commentarius in xiii epistulas Paulinas: ad Romanos (etc.)

Quaest. Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti Anonymous

Barn. Epistula Barnabi

Did. Didache xii apostolorum

Diog. Epistula ad Diognetum Aphrahat

Dem. Demonstrations Arator

Ep. ad Virg. Epistula ad Virgilium end p.xviii

Aristotle

Phys. Physica Arnobius

Nat. Adversus nationes Athanasius of Alexandria

Ar. Orationes tres contra Arianos

Ep. Marcell. Epistula ad Marcellinum

Inc. De incarnatione

Vit. Ant. Vita Antonii Augustine of Hippo

Cat. rud. De catechizandis rudibus

Civ. De civitate dei

Conf. Confessiones

Doct. chr. De doctrina christiana

Ep. Epistulae

Gen. imp. De Genesi ad litteram liber imperfectus

Gen. litt. De Genesi ad litteram

Gen. Man. De Genesi contra Manichaeos

Haer. De haeresibus

Mor. eccl. De moribus ecclesiae catholicae

Nupt. De nuptiis et concupiscentia

Pecc. or. De peccato originali

Pecc. mer. De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo parvulorum

Persev. De dono perseverantiae

Psal. Enarrationes in Psalmos

Retract. Retractationes

Serm. Sermones

Trin. De trinitate Basil of Caesarea

Spir. De Spiritu Sancto

Ep. Epistulae

Hex. In Hexaemeron homiliae Basil of Seleucia

Pasch. In sanctum Pascha homilia Caesarius of Arles

Serm. Sermones end p.xix Clement of Alexandria

Paed. Paedagogus

Prot. Protrepticus

Strom. Stromateis Clement of Rome

1 Clem. Epistula Clementis ad Corinthios Cyprian of Carthage

Ep. Epistulae Cyril of Jerusalem

Catech. 1–18 Catecheses illuminandorum

Catech. 19–23 Catecheses mystagogicae Epiphanius of Salamis

Pan. Panarion (Adversus haereses) Eusebius of Caesarea

Dem. Demonstratio evangelica

Hist. eccl. Historia ecclesiastica

Praep. Praeparatio evangelica

Vit. Const. Vita Constantini Evagrius of Pontus

Cap. pract. Capita practica (Praktikos)

Keph. gnost. Kephalaia gnostica

Schol. in Ps. Scholia in Psalmos

Schol. in Eccl. Scholia in Ecclesiasten Gennadius

Vir. ill. De viris illustribus Gregory of Nazianzus

Carm. Carmina

Ep. Epistulae

Or. Orationes

Poem. Ar. Poemata arcana Gregory of Nyssa

Anim. et res. De anima et resurrectione

Ep. Epistulae

Eun. Contra Eunomium end p.xx

Hex. Apologia in Hexaemeron

Hom. in Eccl. In Ecclesiasten homiliae

Hom. opif. De hominis opificio

Or. catech. Oratio catechetica

Sanct. Pascha In sanctum Pascha homilia Hermas

Mand. Mandata pastoris

Sim. Similitudines pastoris

Vis. Visiones pastoris Hippolytus of Rome

Antichr. De antichristo

Ben. Iacob. De benedictione Iacobi

Haer. Refutatio omnium haeresium Ignatius of Antioch

Eph. Epistula ad Ephesios

Phil. Epistula ad Philadelphios

Rom. Epistula ad Romanos

Smyr. Epistula ad Smyrnaeos

Trall. Epistula ad Trallianos Irenaeus of Lyons

Haer. Adversus haereses Isidore of Seville

Etym. Etymologiae Jerome

Dial. Dialogus contra Pelagianos

Ep. Epistulae

Qu. Heb. Gen. Quaestionum Hebraicorum liber in Genesim

Vir. ill. De viris illustribus John Chrysostom

Hom. in Mt. In Mattheum homilia

Hom. in Rom. In epistolam ad Romanos homilia

Hom. in 2 Thess. In epistulam ad Thessalonicenses 2 homilia

Laed. Quod nemo laeditur nisi a seipso

Poenit. De poenitentia

Sac. De sacerdotio

Scand. Ad eos qui scandalizati sunt ob adversitates end p.xxi John of Damascus

F.o. De fide orthodoxa Josephus

C. Ap. Contra Apionem Julian of Aeclanum

Flo. Ad Florum Justin Martyr

1 Apol. 1 Apologia

2 Apol. 2 Apologia

Dial. Dialogus cum Trypho Lactantius

Inst. Divinae Institutiones

Mort. De mortibus persecutorum Maximus the Confessor

Amb. Ambiguorum liber

Cap. theol. Capita theologica et oecumenica

Ep. Epistulae

Thal. Quaestiones ad Thalassium Maximus of Turin

Serm. Sermones Melito of Sardis

Pass. Homilia in passionem Christi (Peri pascha) Methodius of Olympus

Creat. De creatis (frags.) Nemesius of Emesa

Nat. hom. De natura hominis Origen of Alexandria

Cels. Contra Celsum

Comm. Gen. Commentarii in Genesin

Comm. Jo. Commentarii in Johannem

Comm. Matt. Commentarii in Matthaeum libri x–xi

Comm. Rom. Commentarii in epistulam ad Romanos

Comm. ser. in Mt. Commentariorum series in Mattheum end p.xxii Hom. in Gen. Homiliae in Genesin

Hom. in Jer. Homiliae in Jeremiam

Hom. in Lev. Homiliae in Leviticum

Hom. in Num. Homiliae in Numeros

Or. De oratione

Princ. De principiis Orosius

Hist. adv. pag. Historiarum adversus paganos, libri VII Paulinus of Nola

Carm. Carmina

Ep. Epistulae Philo of Alexandria

Conf. De confusione linguarum

Opif. De opificio mundi Plato

Tim. Timaeus Polycarp of Smyrna

Phil. Epistula ad Philippenses Porphyry

V. Plot. Vita Plotini Pseudo-Clement

Ep. Epistula Clementis Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

D. n. De divinis nominibus

E. h. De ecclesiastica hierarchia Pseudo-Plutarch

Plac. phil. Placita philosophorum Salvian of Marseilles

Gub. De gubernatione Dei

Socrates Scholasticus

Hist. eccl. Historia ecclesiastica end p.xxiii Sozomen

Hist. eccl. Historia ecclesiastica Sulpicius Severus

Chron. Chronicorum libri ii Tatian

Orat. Oratio ad Graecos Tertullian

Ad. Iud. Adversus Iudaeos

An. De anima

Apol. Apologeticus

Bapt. De baptismo

Cor. mil. De corona militum

Exh. cast. De exhortatione castitatis

Fuga pers. De fuga in persecutione

Herm. Adversus Hermogenem

Idol. De idololatria

Marc. Adversus Marcionem

Nat. Ad Nationes

Or. De oratione

Paen. De paenitentia

Pall. De pallio

Praescr. De praescriptione haereticorum

Prax. Adversus Praxean

Pud. De pudicitia

Scap. Ad Scapulam

Virg. De virginibus velandis Theodoret of Cyrrhus

H. rel. Historia religiosa

Hist. eccl. Historia ecclesiastica

Provid. De providentia orationes Theophilus of Antioch

Autol. Ad Autolycum Zacharias of Mytilene

Hist. eccl. Historia ecclesiastica end p.xxiv List of Contributors

William Adler is Professor of Religion at North Carolina State University, Raleigh.

Lewis Ayres is Associate Professor of Historical Theology in the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

Paul M. Blowers is Dean E. Walker Professor of Church History at the Emmanuel School of Religion, Johnson City, Tennessee.

David Brakke is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Sebastian P. Brock is Reader in Syriac Studies Emeritus at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University.

Francine Cardman is Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Elizabeth A. Clark is John Carlisle Kilgo Professor of Religion at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

Brian E. Daley , SJ, is Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana.

Harold A. Drake is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Hubertus R. Drobner is Professor of Church History and Patrology at the Theologische Fakultät Paderborn, Germany.

Mark Edwards is Tutor in Theology at Christ Church and Lecturer in Patristics at Oxford University.

Everett Ferguson is Professor of Church History Emeritus at Abilene Christian University, Abilene, Texas.

Allan D. Fitzgerald , OSA, is Professor of Patristics at the Augustinian Patristic Institute, Rome.

Georgia Frank is Associate Professor of Religion at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York. end p.xxv J. William Harmless , SJ, is Professor of Theology at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska.

Susan Ashbrook Harvey is Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

Michael W. Holmes is Professor of Biblical Studies and Early Christianity at Bethel University, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Mark Humphries is Professor of Ancient History at Swansea University, Swansea, Wales.

David G. Hunter is Cottrill—Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington.

Andrew S. Jacobs is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Robin M. Jensen is Luce Chancellor's Professor of the History of Christian Art and Worship at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Nashville, Tennessee.

Maxwell E. Johnson is Professor of Liturgical Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana.

Joseph F. Kelly is Professor of Religious Studies at John Carroll University, University Heights, Ohio.

Karen L. King is Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Harvard University Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ross Shepard Kraemer is Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

Rebecca Krawiec is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Canisius College, Buffalo, New York.

Mathijs Lamberigts is Professor of Church History and Theology at Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium.

Samuel N. C. Lieu is Professor of Ancient History and Co-Director of the Ancient History Documentary Research Centre, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

J. Rebecca Lyman is Garrett Professor of Church History Emerita at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California.

Antti Marjanen is Docent of New Testament Studies at the University of Helsinki.

Ralph W. Mathisen is Professor of History, Classics, and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign. end p.xxvi Wendy Mayer is Research Associate in the Centre for Early Christian Studies, Australian Catholic University.

John A. McGuckin is Nielsen Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Christian History at Union Theological Seminary, New York, and Professor of Byzantine Christianity at Columbia University, New York.

Richard M. Price is Senior Lecturer in the History of Christianity at Heythrop College, University of London.

Andrew Radde-Gallwitz is Assistant Professor of Theology at Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois.

Éric Rebillard is Professor of Classics and History at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

Michael J. Roberts is Robert Rich Professor of Latin at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.

Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent is a Ph.D. candidate in Early Christianity at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

Michele R. Salzman is Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside.

Daniel Sheerin is Professor of Classics and Theology Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana.

Stephen J. Shoemaker is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon, Eugene.

Columba Stewart , OSB, is Professor of Theology at St. John's School of Theology-Seminary, Collegeville, Minnesota.

William Tabbernee is President and Stephen J. England Professor of the History of Christianity at Phillips Theological Seminary, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Karen Jo Torjesen is Margo L. Goldsmith Professor of Women's Studies and Dean of the School of Religion at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California.

Raymond Van Dam is Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Lucas Van Rompay is Professor of Eastern Christianity at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

Mark Vessey is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Frances M. Young is Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology Emerita at the University of Birmingham. end p.xxvii

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [1]-[4]

Introduction Susan Ashbrook Harvey David G. Hunter Keywords: Christ, Christian RECENT decades have seen an explosion of research in the area of ‘early Christian studies’. This Handbook has been prepared, in large measure, as a response to that development. Early Christian studies examines the history, literature, thought, practices, and material culture of the Christian religion in late antiquity (c. 100–600 CE). Once pursued primarily as a sub-speciality within Ecclesiastical History or Theology (that is, as ‘Patristics’), the study of early Christianity has recently emerged as a distinctive and fully interdisciplinary endeavour in its own right, embracing the fields of Classics, Ancient History, Theology, Religious Studies, Art History, and Archaeology, among others. New trends in historiography, critical theory, and the humanistic sciences have also made their mark on this academic discipline. A number of events have fostered this development. In recent decades there have been discoveries of new documents (for example, the Nag Hammadi Library, the Divjak letters and Dolbeau sermons of Augustine, and the Turfan Manichaean texts). New journals and book series have appeared, as well as a steady stream of new critical editions and translations. ‘Late antiquity’ has increasingly been recognized as a historical period with its own distinctive features and significance. This proliferation of scholarship on early Christianity has called forth the present volume. When the representatives of Oxford University Press approached us with the idea of editing a volume in the Oxford Handbook series, it seemed an ideal opportunity to provide a useful service to the field. Because of the increasing range and diversity of scholarly work in early Christian studies, it has become impossible end p.1

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved for any one scholar to maintain expertise in every aspect of the discipline. Certain topics have provoked an extraordinary amount of discussion (early Christian asceticism, for example, or the fourth-century Trinitarian controversies); other areas have become highly specialized sub-disciplines (Manichaean studies, for example, or Gnostic studies). A scholar working in one branch of early Christianity might have little notion of developments in another area of the field. We hope this volume in the Oxford Handbook series will address this difficulty by introducing readers to the wide variety of ways in which ‘early Christian studies’ are conducted and have been conducted, especially within the past thirty years. We intend it to be an aid to research both for beginners and for more seasoned scholars entering an unfamiliar sub-speciality. To accomplish this task, we invited contributors to address their topics with the

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aim of orienting readers to the current ‘state of the question’ in that area. Contributors were asked to reflect on the main questions or issues that have animated research, to provide an introduction to the relevant primary sources, and to offer some guidance on the directions in which future research might be profitably pursued. Depending on the topic, different contributors emphasized one or more of these tasks, but our intention has been to provide a useful starting point for further investigation in that increasingly disparate discipline of ‘early Christian studies’. This focus on the trajectory of research and the developments within the scholarship itself differentiate this volume from others aiming to provide cogent summary introductions to various topics, figures, or historical assessments (that is, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, or histories). Further, it is the categories, issues, and areas (whether spatial or intellectual) of these developments that have guided our structuring of the essays into broadly defined thematic sections. The structure as a whole is prefaced by a set of prolegomena: three essays surveying the intellectual and scholarly changes that have reframed our study of the early Christian past. We encourage readers to consider the specific discussions of individual chapters against the backdrop of these prefatory essays. The section divisions offer broad ways of organizing early Christian studies. They also reflect how the changing agendas of scholarship have refocused how we consider even the best known of the ancient materials. Thus, following Part I , ‘Prolegomena’, Part II, ‘Evidence: Material and Textual’, considers types of evidence crucial for establishing early Christian history and for providing concrete assessment of the literary evidence that has long dominated historical reconstruction of ancient history. Part III, ‘Identities’, looks at specific religious identities that have long been the foils against which the meaning of the term ‘Christian’ took shape, both by and for its ancient advocates and by modern scholars (as well as adherents). These labels, common in usage but elusive in historical reality, gain further and more nuanced substance in Part IV, ‘Regions’, where the huge geographical expanse of early Christianity is brought into play. One of the most significant results of recent scholarship has been the realization of the extent to which geographical end p.2

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved location affected the issues, concerns, and even forms of early Christianity. Consideration of Donatism in terms other than as a problem confronting Augustine, for example, or of the Cappadocian fathers within their regional context brings to light important but generally neglected features. Part V, ‘Structures and Authorities’, draws out fundamental social structures and ecclesiastical authorities by which ancient Christians organized their lives, whether institutionally, politically, or domestically. Part VI, ‘Expressions of Christian Culture’, looks at the array of literary forms by which Christians articulated their concerns, identities, interests, debates, memories, practices, and teachings. In Part VII, ‘Ritual, Piety, and Practice’, those expressions are considered through their implementation as activities both collective and individual. Part VIII, ‘Theological Themes’, takes up perennially vibrant areas of theological discussion that have been much affected by the scholarly shifts charted in the volume as a whole. Careful review of the Table of Contents and use of the indexes will help readers find topics or key figures whose locations may not seem to be readily apparent under this organizational scheme. Each essay is followed by suggestions for further reading, as well as important bibliography for the topic. The final chapter of the volume, ‘Instrumenta Studiorum: Tools of the Trade’, provides an extensive guide to various scholarly tools critical to any study of the field: major journals,

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published series of critical editions and translations, dictionaries and handbooks of various sorts and foci, data bases, websites, and related research tools. Our hope is that the fruitfulness of recent decades can here be not only acknowledged, but also gathered together in a form that will promote rich inquiry for a long time to come. This volume takes as its chronological duration the period from 100 to 600 CE: that is, the period roughly stretching from the end of the New Testament era to the eve of Islam's appearance on the historical horizon. New Testament studies is in itself a field of massive scholarly enterprise, and its work is handled in a separate volume of the Oxford Handbook series. There will inevitably be some essays in the current volume that require engagement with New Testament materials, just as—at the other end of the chronological spectrum—there will be some that consider trajectories extending into the medieval and Byzantine periods. However, our focus is on that period during which Christianity takes its shape specifically as a religion. The salient issues are not those involving the historical figure of Jesus or his immediate followers or the formation of the New Testament documents, but rather, how the movement around those persons and events became an established, institutionalized, differentiated religion: a body of self-identified adherents related (however loosely) by practices and beliefs. end p.3

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The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [7]-[41]

1 From Patristics to Early Christian Studies

*

*

Older scholarship discussed in this essay will be cited in the main text with the original publication date; but the Bibliography gives the publication date for the English edition, generally the most recent (or most accessible) edition. Elizabeth A. Clark Abstract: Creating Patristics – From Patristics to Early Christian Studies – Bridges between Old and New Keywords: Christ, Christian CHARLES Kannengiesser's presidential address to the North American Patristics Society in 1990 was a lament originally titled ‘Bye, Bye Patristics’. Most of the classically-educated French scholars who had revitalized patristics as part of what Kannengiesser termed ‘the spiritual and humanistic revival in Europe after World War II’ were dead, and educational support for these studies in Europe was dwindling (Kannengiesser 1989: 655, 638, 642). Yet, as Kannengiesser conceded in a subsequent essay, these giants in the field had not engaged (as he put it) ‘the new social dimension of patristics’ (Kannengiesser 1991: 133)—the very characteristic that distinguishes ‘early Christian studies’. The passage from ‘patristics’ to ‘early Christian studies’, however, is not the whole story that is sketched here: we must first ask, how did ‘patristics’ itself emerge as a discipline?1 end p.7

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1.1 Creating Patristics To be sure, medieval and early modern scholars, Protestant Reformers, and the Caroline divines studied Augustine, Jerome, John Chrysostom, and other church fathers—from the late fifteenth century onward, in printed editions. Yet patristics did not truly become a discipline in the modern sense of the word until the nineteenth century: the English word ‘patristic’ was allegedly coined by Isaac Taylor (1787–1865).2 Moreover, even in the nineteenth century, apologetics and polemics often dominated the discussion. For patristics to achieve disciplinary status, institutional arrangements (universities, seminaries, conferences) and scholarly apparatuses (critical editions of texts and professional journals) needed to be established. Different circumstances attended the development of patristics in various countries. In nineteenth-century Germany, the world-acclaimed, governmentsupported (and largely Protestant) university system was decisive. In Catholic

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France, editions of patristic texts by the Benedictines of St Maur and J.-P. Migne's Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca were central; while in later decades, the Modernist crisis and the disenchantment with Thomism revived interest in patristics. In England, the Oxford Movement and the reactions to it throughout the nineteenth century spurred scholarship on the fathers. Scholars from many other European countries also contributed to the development of patristics. Belgium's Jean-Baptiste Malou was instrumental in the production of the Patrologia Graeca (Hamman 1985), while in the twentieth century, Belgium was the seat of production for the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (1954) and Series Graeca (1977). Louvain also became a renowned centre for the study of ‘oriental’ patristics, as is discussed below. In the Netherlands, formally separated from Belgium in 1830, Protestant scholars were slow to develop an interest in patristic studies. In 1923, with the founding of the Catholic University of Nijmegen, patristics received stronger encouragement. Special mention should be made of Dom Eligius Dekkers, who created the Clavis Patrum Latinorum (1951) and was a driving force behind the establishment at mid-century of the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Lamberigts 1998–9).3 An important—and continuing—Dutch contribution to patristic studies is the journal Vigiliae Christianae, whose first issue appeared in 1947, and which for many years was edited chiefly by Christine Mohrmann and Jan Hendrik Waszink. Eighteenth-century Italian scholars edited and reprinted patristic sources (Petitmengin 1985: 30); in the nineteenth century, Giovanni Battista de Rossi's research on Roman catacombs and inscriptions greatly advanced knowledge of early Christian material culture and practice. In Vienna, the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum was begun in 1866. As is evident, contributions from scholars of various European nations have been important for the development of end p.8

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved modern patristic studies. In this essay, however, a brief review of developments in Germany, France, and England must suffice. Protestant scholars in Germany and England (outside the circle of the Oxford Movement) showed a decided preference for the fathers of the first two centuries, who, in their view, remained closer to the revealed truth of the Bible. In the following centuries, they claimed, ‘decline’ became rampant—as manifested in metaphysical speculation and conciliar débâcles, allegorical exegesis, ‘unscriptural’ asceticism, ecclesiastical hierarchy, and ‘state-churchism’. Despite German scholars' alleged embrace of the new historical and critical methods, their sectarian and anti-Catholic prejudices, overlaid with a modified Hegelianism, obstructed the development of a more solidly ‘historical’ view of the early church. Such skewing, however, was by no means solely a ‘German problem’: as Maurice Wiles has pointedly observed, the entanglements of present concerns with scholarship on the past almost inevitably ‘skew the way evidence is read and interpreted’ (Wiles 2003: 153).

1.1.1 Germany German universities led the way in creating the academic discipline of church history, the rubric under which patristics developed in the Protestant world. Before the era of readily available critical editions and monographs, the interest in patristics can be charted largely through its treatment in textbooks and general histories of the early church: Johann L. Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History (1750s); Johann Gieseler's Text-Book of Church History (1824); and at

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mid-century Augustus Neander's General History of the Christian Religion and Church. The lack of ready access to primary sources was a central obstacle to the development of the field. Mosheim, for example, believed that his contribution lay chiefly in his consultation—uncommon in his day—of the ‘original records... the genuine sources of sacred history’. Many manuscripts were still unavailable to scholars, he complained, being shut up ‘in the collections of the curious (or the opulent, who are willing to pass for such)’. Although Roman Catholic scholars had greater access to manuscripts (presumably in the Vatican Library and elsewhere), their advantage had not forestalled, in Mosheim's view, their massive errors of interpretation (Mosheim 1810: pp. xiii–xvi). Evangelistic Christians, however, who considered Mosheim's text ‘rationalistic’ and devoid of Christian fervour, turned to Johann Gieseler's Text-Book of Church History, which provided both lengthy extracts from the primary sources and evangelical spirit. Most favoured by mid-nineteenth-century professors, however, were the works of Augustus Neander, who held the Professorship of Church History at Berlin. Those who deemed Gieseler's textbook too synoptic; Mosheim's, ‘scanty, cold, and superficial’; and English works by Milman and Waddington ‘diffuse, declamatory, partisan, ignorant, popular’ and ‘mislead[ing]’, praised Neander's end p.9

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved General History of the Christian Religion and Church as the only one worthy of the name.4 Yet his multi-volumed work was far too large and dense for classroom use (and too wedded to the notion of ‘development’ for the taste of some Englishlanguage scholars). Also much admired at the time were Neander's studies of John Chrysostom and of Julian ‘the Apostate’. Several decades later, Adolph von Harnack's History of Dogma and Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries strongly influenced the developing conception of patristics on the Continent and in the United States. The production of critical editions and monographs received a further stimulus in 1882, when Harnack and Oscar von Gebhardt founded Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur. In 1890, the Prussian Academy, impelled by Harnack and Theodor Mommsen, established the Kirchenväter-Kommission that produced the series Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte—a bringing together of Altertumswissenschaft and Kirchengeschichte (Treu 1993; May 1993; Rebenich 1993). Mommsen's stimulation of prosopographical research also encouraged the creation of The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire by British scholars A. H. M. Jones and associates (1971) and the Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire by Henri-Irénée Marrou and other French scholars (1982). Accompanying these endeavours was the establishment of journals, the numbers of which markedly increased in the years after 1870 (Fugmann and Pollmann 1995: 240, 254–7). Last, the translation of patristic texts into German was undertaken by the Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, established in 1869. In the twentieth century, the first volume of Franz-Josef Dölger's Antike und Christentum: Kultur und Religiongeschichtliche Studien appeared in 1929. Dölger, like many scholars internationally, wished to ground early Christianity more firmly in its late ancient classical setting; the name change of his institute to Institut zur Erforschung der Spätantike underscored this point (Fontaine 1984: 456). And from Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's request that Werner Jaeger undertake the edition of Gregory of Nyssa's Contra Eunomium resulted the edition of Gregorii Nyssensi opera (Jaeger 1921–).5 More recently, in 1997, Hanns Christof Brennecke and Christoph Markshies

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launched the Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum (ZAC) (Journal of Ancient Christianity). Linking German- and English-speaking scholars, ZAC aims to incorporate ‘patristics’ into the newer scholarship on late antiquity, methodologies of the history of religions, and material culture (Kessler 1998: 520). In their first editorial, Brennecke and Markshies noted that increasing specialization among late ancient studies scholars often left them unaware of important discoveries, editions, or debates in areas related to their own; ZAC would serve to communicate such information, as well as to offer both ‘external’ and ‘inner-Christian’ perspectives on early Christian history and theology (Brennecke and Markshies 1997). ZAC renders an important service to the international community of patristics scholars. end p.10

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1.1.2 France Even in the seventeenth century, French scholars were active in creating tools for patristic scholarship. Jean Mabillon's pioneering work on the principles of documentary criticism (De re diplomatica, 1681) was an impetus for later critical scholarship. The Benedictine Maurists at Saint-Germain-des-Prés undertook editions of patristic texts, starting with the works of Augustine in 1679; in the eighteenth century, they continued with editions of John Chrysostom, Basil, Tertullian, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyprian, Origen, and Gregory of Nazianzus (Chaussy 1989: 91–4, 189–93; Petitmengin 1985: 27–9)—an enterprise, Gibbon pointedly remarked, that should have made scholars in England blush with shame.6 Of special importance were the Maurist Bernard de Montfaucon's editions of Athanasius, Origen, and John Chrysostom, which were either reprinted or used as a base by Migne. In addition, Louis-Sébastien le Nain de Tillemont's multi-volumed Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire ecclésiastique des six premiers siècles (1693–1712) provided a detailed account of the early church. French scholarship on the fathers thus received an early and impressive start. J.-P. Migne's publication of the 218 volumes of the Patrologia Latina (1844–64) and the 166 volumes of the Patrologia Graeca (1857–66) marked a major step in making patristic texts available to a wider public—although doubtless not as wide as the abbé himself desired (Bloch 1994; Mandouze and Fouilheron 1985).7 Migne's patrologies were a truly ‘international’ collaboration, involving scholars, editors, and proofreaders from Greece, Germany, Spain, Holland, and Belgium, along with a large contingent of Frenchmen, among whom Dom Jean-Baptiste Pitra's (often unacknowledged) work was central to the enterprise (Catrice 1985: 218; Soltner 1985). The fortunes of patristic studies in nineteenth-century France were adversely affected by anticlericalism, the Franco—Prussian War, and the distinctive organization of the state university system, which was sometimes inhospitable to theology (Fontaine 1984: 448). In contrast to Germany, the university was not decisive in the French development of patristic studies. Although the Catholic University of Paris was established in 1875, it acquired a faculty of theology only in 1889, after the suppression of the Sorbonne's. Yet, since a French law of 1880 had prohibited private institutions from granting degrees or using the title ‘university’, the Catholic University was reduced to an ‘Institute’, and the study of ‘patristics’ was, in effect, pushed outside a university setting (Bressolette 1993: 193–4; Fredouille 1993: 100). As Émile Poulat has expressed it, in France, ‘the knowledge of the fathers thus appeared as a culture before becoming a specialty’ (Poulat 1993: 24). In late nineteenth-century France, the recovery of the patristic tradition provided

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an important counter to the narrow focus on Thomism fostered by Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni patris (1879), while in the twentieth century, French theologians encouraged a renewed Christian spirituality through a return to the fathers.8 end p.11

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Moreover, the debate over Modernism in the early twentieth century, although largely concerned with biblical criticism, also became a cause célèbre within patristic studies: Alfred Loisy's L'Evangile et l'église (1902) stood as a pointed retort to Harnack's ahistorical, ‘essentializing’ approach to early Christianity in Das Wesen des Christentums (1899) (Fontaine 1993: p. xiii; Poulat 1993: 22; Savon 1993: 127).9 In the same period, the French Benedictine Dom Germain Morin was editing works of Jerome, Augustine, and Caesarius of Arles (Vessey 1993a). Years later, amidst the gruelling hardships of the Second World War, French Jesuits established the Sources Chrétiennes series of patristic texts, now numbering around 500 volumes. A stirring story of Sources Chrétiennes' early years is given in Etienne Fouilloux's La Collection ‘Sources Chrétiennes’: Editer les Pères de l'église au XX e siècle (1995). Augustinian studies in particular flourished, with the founding of the Institut d'Études Augustiniennes in 1956 and the convocation of the Congrès international augustinien in 1954. Jacques Fontaine stresses the importance of the links between lay scholars and those in religious orders in creating a more ‘scientific’ patristics in France (Abbé Paul Lejay, Paul Monceaux, Pierre de Labriolle, followed by Jean Bayet, Pierre Courcelle, and Henri-Irénée Marrou). Through the work of these and other scholars, Christian studies were incorporated into the newly named ‘late antiquity’, a field created by classicists who sought to bridge the ‘no man's land’ between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages (Fontaine 1984: 454). The French development of patristics thus differed from that in countries where Protestantism dominated; in the latter, patristics was more tightly linked to New Testament studies, and the fathers of the first three centuries received pride of place. (For a helpful overview of the development of patristics on the Continent through the middle decades of the twentieth century, see Charles Kannengiesser's ‘Fifty Years of Patristics’ (Kannengiesser 1989).)

1.1.3 Great Britain In England, the development of patristics was marked by the Church of England's dominant role in nineteenth-century university life: Anglicanism's ‘self-definition’ —unlike that of Lutheran and Calvinist churches on the Continent—involved a strong identification with the church fathers (Wiles 2003: 153). High-church Oxford Movement scholars, Edward Pusey and John Henry Newman in particular, spurred interest in patristic studies and collaborated in publishing the Oxford Library of the Fathers (1835–88). An early ‘warning’ against the Tractarians' love affair with patristics was sounded by Isaac Taylor, who, though grateful for their uncovering of the alleged ‘pretensions of the Romish church’, was alarmed by the confidence that they placed in the fathers; Taylor set about ‘to loosen a little that antiquarian enthusiasm which is end p.12

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putting every thing [sic] dear to us in peril’ (I. Taylor 1840: pp. viii, xi, xiv).10 That the high-church appropriation of the fathers was still hotly challenged in the late nineteenth century reveals that movement's powerful influence (Lefroy 1897). Perhaps to provide a more evangelically Protestant version of early Christian texts, the Ante-Nicene Christian Library series was begun by the Scotsmen Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson in 1864. Several of the most prominent English authorities on patristic Christianity—J. B. Lightfoot and F. J. A. Hort, better known as New Testament scholars—were primarily interested in the first three centuries of Christianity, in which territory they steered a mean between high-church Anglicanism (with its concentration on clerical hierarchy, doctrine, and liturgy) and a ‘morbid’ Puritanism (Lightfoot 1895: 56–7; Hort 1895: 2, 86). At the turn to the twentieth century, two noteworthy publications were launched in England. The Journal of Theological Studies (JTS) was founded in 1899 under the editorship of Henry B. Swete. Swete claimed that until then no English journal had ‘devoted itself exclusively to the furtherance of theological learning’ among students and teachers of theology (Swete 1899). Although hoping for an international readership, the editors of JTS nonetheless believed that a more judicious embrace of the new critical scholarship suited Englishmen better than the more radical approaches emanating from Germany (Wiles 1999: 492 n. 1, 508). Another of Swete's contributions to the establishment of patristics in England was his small handbook Patristic Study, published in 1902. Although designed for busy clergymen, Patristic Study outlined an ambitious programme of guided reading in the Greek and Latin fathers, along with basic bibliography. A second important undertaking was the Patristic Greek Lexicon. The Lexicon, begun in 1906, was completed only in 1961 under the editorship of G. W. H. Lampe. Along the way, the Lexicon became a supplement to the Liddell—Scott —Jones dictionary, whose editors in the early twentieth century chose to exclude references to Christian texts except for the New Testament (Chadwick 1982: 66; Burghardt 1950: 265–8; Souter 1903: 512). Last but not least, Leslie Cross's establishment of the Oxford International Patristic Conference in 1951 was of signal importance for the encouragement of patristic scholarship in the later twentieth century. Meeting every four years, this conference now attracts more than 700 scholars, many of whose papers are published in Studia Patristica. In addition, the Oxford Conference spurred the development of more specialized symposia on Origen and on Gregory of Nyssa (Wiles 2003: 158, 161–3).

1.1.4 ‘Oriental’ Patristics One important—and trans-national—aspect of patristic studies from the nineteenth century onward has been scholarship on the ‘oriental’ fathers. To this end, the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO) was founded in 1903 end p.13

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved in Paris, and the Patrologia Orientalis (PO) in 1907. The CSCO has published several hundred volumes of Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic texts, with the PO adding Armenian and Georgian to its repertoire. In mid-twentieth-century Belgium, Paulin Ladeuze and Louis Théophile Lefort promoted Coptic studies, while Joseph Lebon's work on Monophysite sources (especially Severus of Antioch) fostered Syriac patristics. Tracing the development of Syriac and other ‘oriental’ studies in Europe from the sixteenth century, Sebastian Brock stressed

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the importance of collaboration between scholars from the Middle East and India, for whom patristic traditions remained a living faith, and European scholars (British, Estonian, Dutch, French, German, Irish, Italian) trained in criticalhistorical methods (Brock 1994a, b). In addition to critical editions of these ‘oriental’ fathers' writings, the proliferation of interpretive studies and translations—especially in the areas of asceticism, ‘heresy’, liturgy, hymnology, Mariology, and biblical exegesis—makes knowledge of these ‘oriental’ writers' works available to a wider audience (e.g. Brock 1984, 1992, 1997, 1998, 1999; Drijvers 1984; McVey 1989; Griffith 1992, 1995, 2002; Frishman and Van Rompay 1997; Shoemaker 2002). The study of eastern Christian texts now flourishes to the extent that younger students of late ancient Christianity routinely expect to acquire facility in the languages of ancient Christianity other than Greek and Latin.

1.2 From Patristics to Early Christian Studies How did ‘patristics’ become ‘early Christian studies’ in the late twentieth century, and how did ‘early Christian studies’ itself develop to adopt new modes of analysis? Several factors—most prominently exhibited in North America—fostered the change in conception and nomenclature. The term ‘patristics’ fell increasingly into disuse, taken as a sign of ecclesiasticism, maleness, and ‘orthodoxy’, from which some scholars wished to dissociate themselves. Yet the more traditional topics—philology, theology, exegesis, historical studies—continued to flourish, sometimes taking surprising turns.

1.2.1 Institutional Factors For understanding changes in nomenclature and conception, institutional considerations claim first consideration. As ‘patristics’ was assimilated to Humanities end p.14

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved departments in secular universities and colleges, the relevance of confessional alliance declined: polemics there might be, but they did not usually relate to issues of sectarian commitment, as was frequently the case in the nineteenth century. Although graduate education was slow to develop in the United States (Veysey 1965; Oleson and Voss 1979; Storr 1953), fifty-two Ph.D. programmes in Religion were in operation by 1970, aided by a 1963 Supreme Court ruling that granted public educational institutions the right to teach ‘about’ religion. Between 1964 and 1968, the number of graduate students in Religion jumped from 7,383 to 12,620, a rate of growth exceeding that of any other academic discipline. From this time onward, graduate students in Religion frequently chose programmes in non-denominational departments of religious studies within university settings. This trend was also present in some of the newer British universities, such as Manchester and Bristol. Programmes at Columbia, Duke, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, among other universities, spurred change in the discipline through organizing special seminars and reading groups on late antiquity/early Christianity. As Conrad Cherry has put it, there was ‘the birth of a new university discipline out of the womb of theological studies’ (Cherry 1995: 90)—and ‘early Christian studies’ received the benefit of the field's overall growth. Moreover, the fact that North American academic life (unlike that of some

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European institutions) is organized so that junior scholars—women in almost equal numbers with men—are installed in regular-rank academic positions, and have the chance (with appropriate scholarly productivity) to rise to the professoriate, provides greater opportunity for the younger cohort to explore their own research interests. In these settings, traditional conceptions of ‘patristics’ were rapidly modified. The organization of academia and the rapid growth of religious studies programmes are thus significant institutional factors in the shift to ‘early Christian studies’. Another institutional factor spurring new approaches was the formation of the North American Patristics Society (NAPS) in 1970, which now counts more than 1,500 members and hosts conferences attracting international audiences.11 Although in the late 1980s and early 1990s, NAPS members heatedly debated a name change for the Society, they reached a tacit agreement that non-traditional approaches could be accommodated under the older rubric. The launching of the Journal of Early Christian Studies (JECS; a continuation of Second Century, 1981–92) by NAPS in 1993 provided a venue for scholarship from non-traditional standpoints—‘a showcase for work in newer fields, such as women's studies and literary theory’, the editors wrote in the first issue (Clark and Ferguson 1993: p. vi). Elizabeth Clark and Everett Ferguson (who had been editor of Second Century) were the founding editors, with J. Patout Burns assuming a co-editorship in 2000, and David Brakke the head editorship in 2005. JECS now counts more than 1,400 subscriptions world-wide. end p.15

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Another institutional factor that encouraged new approaches was the establishment of book series. Of signal importance was Peter Brown's editorship of The Transformation of the Classical Heritage series at the University of California Press, which published its first volume in 1981 and now boasts more than thirty titles. Also important is the recently revived series, Oxford Early Christian Texts, edited by Gillian Clark and Andrew Louth, while Oxford Early Christian Studies, started in the early 1990s, has continued to flourish. A more theoretically oriented series, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion, now published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, is edited by Daniel Boyarin, Virginia Burrus, and Derek Kreuger. NAPS also sponsors a Patristic Monograph Series, presently published by the Catholic University of America Press and edited by Philip Rousseau. Scholars from the Catholic University of America also contributed The Fathers of the Church and Ancient Christian Writers series, which has provided scores of patristic texts in English translation (Kannengiesser 1989: 643). The development of publishing venues explicitly focused on late antiquity and early Christianity was of central importance in promoting a new conceptualization of the field. Last, it is significant that some of the most influential scholars of late ancient Christian studies in the English-speaking world—including, but not limited to, Timothy Barnes, Peter Brown, Averil Cameron, Robin Lane Fox, Ramsay MacMullen, Robert Markus, and Mark Vessey—are by disciplinary training and academic placement situated entirely outside departments of theology or religious studies. Their contributions have immensely enriched the study of early Christianity by bringing (among other things) a strong historical and ‘area studies’ approach to the subject. ‘Early Christian studies’ is now conceptualized less often as a branch of ‘church history’ than as an aspect of late ancient history and literature (Brakke 2002: 475–6). Neither denominationally oriented institutions nor religious studies departments, in other words, can now claim a monopoly on the field. Institutional arrangements, it is clear, have been central to the development of ‘early Christian studies’, especially in North America.

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1.2.2 Disciplinary Factors: Social History Another factor influencing the development of ‘early Christian studies’ is disciplinary: social history's dominance of the historical profession in the second half of the twentieth century. More recently, social history absorbed some aspects of cultural history, including an older ‘history of ideas’; Roger Chartier suggests the phrase ‘the cultural history of the social’ to describe this shift (Chartier 1989: 549, 552). In the English-speaking world, scholarship on the social history of the late Republic and early Empire by Sir Ronald Syme, Fergus Millar, Peter Brown, John Matthews, Keith Hopkins, Richard Saller, Peter Garnsey, and Roger Bagnall, among others, was eagerly assimilated by those working in early and late ancient Christian studies. end p.16

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Within early Christian studies, the interest in social history was manifest in research on women, asceticism, law, slavery, writing, the family, children, and heresy. On the family, for example, we can note anthologies edited by Halvor Moxnes (1997) and by David Balch and Carolyn Osiek (2003) and studies by Raymond Van Dam (2003), Brent Shaw (1987) Andrew Jacobs (2003) and Rebecca Krawiec (2003). In law, books by Judith Evans Grubbs (1995), Antti Arjava (1996), and Jill Harries (1999) proved important, as have studies of children (Leyerle 1997; Bakke 2005). (Other topics will be discussed below.) In addition, new Letters and Sermons of Augustine, discovered and edited by (respectively) Johannes Divjak (1981) and François Dolbeau (1996), have added a valuable cache of texts relating to the social world of that church father. Last, computers have enabled social historians, including those of late Christian antiquity, to achieve a higher degree of precision and refinement in their work, as is evidenced by Michele Salzman's The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire (2002).

1.2.3 Social Science Influences Still another impetus to the changed conception of ‘patristics’ was an interest, shared by many scholars of religion, in certain aspects of the social sciences, especially anthropology. In addition, social-scientific theory provided new ‘mental tools’ quite different from the theological approaches that had dominated traditional early Christian studies. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the seminars sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and organized by Wayne Meeks on ‘the social world of Christianity’ encouraged the social-historical and social-scientific approaches of (among others) William Countrymen (1980), Elizabeth Clark (1979), and Bruce Malina (1986). Likewise, groups meeting under the aegis of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature (‘The Social World of Early Christianity’; ‘Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity’; ‘Early Christian Families’; ‘Social History of Formative Judaism and Christianity’; ‘Europe and the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity’) spurred interest in social science, as well as social history, approaches. Scholars treating texts of the earlier patristic period (1 Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, Ignatius, and the Didache) drew on theories derived from Max Weber, Bryan Wilson, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckman, Émile Durkheim, and Pierre Bourdieu to illumine their work. Slightly later, social network theory, with its analyses of power relationships and ‘brokerage’, enabled scholars of early Christianity to unravel the workings of patronage and social hierarchy in late antiquity; a special issue of the journal Semeia (56 (1992)), edited by L. Michael White, was devoted to the subject. Studies of the social mechanisms of resistance, ritual theory, cost—benefit analysis, and public policy have variously

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inspired writings by Brent Shaw (1996), Rodney Stark (1996), Hal Drake (2000), and Michael Penn (2005). end p.17

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Cultural anthropology, however, was the branch of social science most frequently appropriated by scholars of early Christianity and late antiquity. The ‘thick description’ of interpretive anthropology (Geertz 1973) resonated with historians' efforts to explain via contextualization. In addition, the subject-matter of some anthropological studies—purity and impurity, symbols—seemed ready-made for religious studies scholars, as were such theoretical tools as Mary Douglas's ‘grids and groups’ for the study of social connections and power relations inside and outside various communities (Douglas 1970). Peter Brown pioneered the introduction of anthropology to studies of late ancient Christianity. Reflecting on his intellectual development, Brown stressed the liberating effect of Mary Douglas's work on his early scholarship: books such as Purity and Danger ‘did not circulate among ancient historians’, he wrote, but only among those who studied ‘small face-to-face societies’ (Brown 1997: 10, 21). Brown's essay on sorcery (1972) provides a good example of his anthropological investment. Once anthropology was acknowledged as a stimulating ‘talking partner’ for religious studies scholars, the latter appropriated the notion of ‘liminality’ from Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner for the analysis of early Christian rituals such as baptism. Anthropological studies of pilgrimage (e.g. by Victor Turner and Edith Turner (1978)) were put to good use in Georgia Frank's The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (2000) and David Frankfurter's edited volume, Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt (1998). Anthropological studies by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas of food practices (including cannibalism) informed articles and books by Andrew McGowan (1994, 1999), Blake Leyerle (1995), and Teresa Shaw (1998).

1.2.4 Social Justice and the Academy Another important influence on the development of early Christian studies originated outside the academy in movements seeking social justice for minorities—the formerly colonized, women, and gays—but readily found expression inside. Scholars of early Christianity, like their counterparts across the Humanities and Social Sciences, analysed the topics of women, sexuality, gender, ‘the body’, power, and post-coloniality from historical, theoretical, and comparative standpoints. The first scholarly manifestation of these interests within early Christian studies pertained to women (Ruether 1974, 1979; Kraemer 1980, 1988; E. A. Clark 1979, 1983, 1984, 1986; Brock and Harvey 1987; with further contributions by Torjesen 1993; G. Clark 1993; Power 1995; Cooper 1996; Brooten 1996; Miller 2005; and Johnson 2006; among others—the Virgin Mary not excepted, Limberis 1994). From beyond the English-speaking world, this new sub-field was enriched with studies by (for example) Franca Ela Consolino (1986, 1988), Ruth Albrecht (1986), Kari Elisabeth Børresen (1981, 1991), Cordula Nolte (1995), Ann Jensen (1996), and Ute Eisen (2000). end p.18

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Linked to the interest in the social history of women was the investigation of gender, ‘the body’, and sexuality. Scholars of early Christianity were greatly influenced both by Michel Foucault's volumes on The History of Sexuality (1978–86), in which sexuality in the ancient world was treated as a social and historically situated category, and by Aline Rousselle's Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity (1983). Peter Brown's The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988) was an early and important contribution to this discussion for religion scholars. Interests in women, sexuality, the body, diet, ancient medicine, and power merged in studies by Elizabeth Castelli (1986), Gail Patterson Corrington (1986), Elizabeth Clark (1989), Virginia Burrus (1991, 1994), and Teresa Shaw (1998). ‘Gender’, however, was not left entirely to social historians of early Christianity; more theologically oriented studies also mined the theme (Miles 1992; Harrison 1990; Coakley 1996; Burrus 2000). Although these studies have preponderantly focused on the female and ‘the feminine’, a growing number treat masculinity, male homoerotic interest, and transvestism (e.g. S. Young 1994; Cooper and Leyser 2000; Brakke 1995b, 2001; Davis 2002). Interest in ‘the body’ also emerged in scholarly work on suffering and martyrdom (Droge and Tabor 1992; Perkins 1995; Boyarin 1999; Castelli 2004). Significant essays from the Journal of Early Christian Studies on these topics—as well as on suicide and torture—include James Rives's ‘The Piety of a Persecutor’ (1996); Dennis Trout's ‘Re-textualizing Lucretia: Cultural Subversion in the City of God’ (1994); and Brent Shaw's ‘Judicial Nightmares and Christian Memory’ (2003). Still a different approach to ‘the body’ is illustrated by Susan Ashbrook Harvey's Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (2006). While scholars of late ancient Christianity, often inspired by film theory, had for some years explored the role of vision, ‘the gaze’, in early Christian texts (Leyerle 1993; Frank 2000), Harvey turns to a different sense, that of smell. Smells, Harvey argues, served as powerful signifiers in that they were invisible and immaterial, yet viscerally experienced, transgressive and unstable, unable to be contained. Especially in the post-Constantinian era did Christians engage the olfactory sense in liturgical practice, and as associated with relics, asceticism, and pilgrimage. Here, bodily experience is seen to bear epistemological significance, as a means for humans to gain knowledge of their relation to the divine. Interest in women, gender, sexuality, and ‘the body’ merged in the renewed interest in early Christian asceticism—a topic that had often been neglected by scholars coming from Protestant traditions. Now, however, quests for the ‘origins’ of asceticism and phenomenological approaches retreated, and greater attention was paid to differentiation by time and place: for Egypt, see Rousseau (1985), Elm (1994), Brakke (1995a, 2006), and Goehring (1999); for Cappadocia, see Elm (1994) and Rousseau (1994); for Gaul, see Klingshirn (1994) and Stewart (1998); for Italy, see Trout (1999) and Lizzi (1989; 1991); for Palestine, see Binns (1994) and Hirschfeld (1992); for Syria, see Brock (1984, 1992, 1998); and Griffith (1994, 1995). Philip end p.19

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Rousseau's Ascetics, Authority, and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian (1978) covered more than one area and author, as did Elizabeth Clark's Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends (1979), Susan Ashbrook Harvey's Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and ‘The Lives of the Eastern Saints’ (1990), and Conrad Leyser's Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (2000). The work of the Society of Biblical Literature's Group on Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity resulted in two large volumes, Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Wimbush 1990) and Asceticism (Wimbush

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and Valantasis 1995). Particular practices of asceticism, such as fasting (T. Shaw 1998) and ‘spiritual marriage’ (Leyerle 2001), received special attention. Jerome's contribution to the development of women's asceticism was given thorough treatment by Patrick Laurence (1997). Equally to be noted are late ancient Christians who stood against the (to them) excessive ascetic enthusiasm fostered by Jerome and others. Robert Markus memorably characterized Augustine's contribution to the debate as ‘a defence of Christian mediocrity’ (1990), while articles (1987, 1993) and a book by David Hunter (2007) have provided the fullest discussion in recent times of the opponents of ascetic fervour. The traditional view that Egyptian ascetics were illiterate devotees was challenged by Samuel Rubenson's claims for the letters of Antony—letters which, if accepted as authentic, establish that ‘desert father’ as a sophisticated interpreter of Origenist theology (Rubenson 1990). Another area in Egyptian monasticism of burgeoning interest is Shenoute studies. Stephen Emmel heads an international team of scholars engaged in preparing the critical editions of Shenoute's Canons and Discourses. Books reflecting this interest include Rebecca Krawiec's Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery (2002) and Caroline Schroeder's Disciplining the Monastic Body: The Asceticism of Shenoute of Atripe (2006). That asceticism, in theory an expression of humility, might in practice provide ample opportunity for the exercise of power was a view stimulated by Peter Brown's now classic article, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’ (1971). This essay, revised several times, was feted on its twenty-fifth anniversary by a conference held at the University of California—Berkeley and by an issue of the JECS (1998).12 The analysis of power was also at the forefront of Brown's Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (1992), Richard Lim's Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity (1995), and Elizabeth DePalma Digeser's The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius and Rome (2000). That bishops became significant wielders of power as well as communitybuilders was evident in Neil McLynn's Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (1994) and McLynn's forthcoming ‘Gregory of Nazianzus: Orthodoxy and Experiment in a Christian Empire’, William Klingshirn's Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (1994), Philip Rousseau's Basil of Caesarea (1994), David Brakke's Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (1995a), Andrea Sterk's Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church: The Monk-Bishop in Late Antiquity end p.20

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved (2004), Claudia Rapp's Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity (2005), and Susanna Elm's ‘Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Gregory of Nazianzus, Emperor Julian, and the Christianization of the Late Roman Elites’ (forthcoming)—while James J. O'Donnell's Augustine: A New Biography (2005), with its focus on that bishop's battles with the Donatists (and others), sets its subject resolutely in the realm of ‘power politics’.

1.2.5 ‘Others’ and Neighbours Another indication of changes within ‘early Christian studies’ itself is the integration of early Christianity into the larger study of ‘late antiquity’ and its placement alongside its Jewish and ‘pagan’ neighbours. Indeed, some—such as David Brakke—have argued that the term ‘Christian’ might well be dropped in descriptions of the field in favour of ‘late ancient studies’ or ‘late antiquity’, which accords no privileged place to Christianity. Such was the guiding plan of the American Academy of Religion programme unit organized in 1994 by Brakke and

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Kate Cooper, ‘Europe and the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity’ (Brakke 2002: 475–8). That the thirteenth volume of The Cambridge Ancient History (1998), devoted to the late Empire, positions ‘orthodox’ Christianity alongside its ‘polytheist’, Jewish, Manichaean, and alleged heretical neighbours signals that historians of late antiquity now recognize religion's central importance in the era's cultural history (Cameron and Garnsey 1998). The development of Manichaean studies in relation to the Roman Empire has brought that particular ‘other’ into clearer view (S. N. C. Lieu 1992; BeDuhn 2000)—and who might constitute ‘neighbour’ or ‘other’ continues to expand as scholars focus on the Roman frontier and beyond (Garsoïan, Mathews, and Thomson 1982; Cowe 1990–1; Blanchard and Darling Young 1998). Post-colonial theory has spurred new interest among scholars of Christian antiquity concerning notions of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ (Buell 2002, 2005). The study of late ancient Christianity's relations with Judaism has also gone on apace, with seminal works such as Wayne Meeks and Robert Wilken's Jews and Christians in Antioch (1978) and Wilken's The Land Called Holy (1992), followed by Miriam Taylor's Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity (1995), Judith Lieu's Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (1996) and Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (2004), Andrew Jacobs's Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (2004), Daniel Boyarin's Border Lines: The Partition of JudaeoChristianity (2004), and in essays and a book by Paula Fredriksen (1995, 1999, 2006). An issue of JECS (9/4 (2001)), edited by Daniel Boyarin, explored the topic ‘Judaeo-Christianity Redivivus’. Studies of women in Judaism, Christianity, and paganism of the era include Ross Kraemer's Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (1992). end p.21

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved A lively interest in the ‘other’ has also been exhibited in discussions of what was formerly labelled ‘heresy’. In 1982, Patrick Henry rued that social challenges to ‘authority’ in the 1960s encouraged the view within early Christian studies that ‘orthodoxy’ was oppressive and its challengers (‘heretics’) more interesting and worthy of study. Scholarship, Henry claimed, had gone beyond an ‘even-handed’ treatment of the ‘heretics’, who were now seen as ‘the true religious geniuses’ (Henry 1982). While Henry appeared correct in his analysis of changing currents, some might applaud, rather than rue, the development he noted. Texts that were once considered outside the purview of orthodoxy (Ehrman 2003; Koester 1965) are now well incorporated into early Christian studies. Especially prominent has been work on the apocryphal acts of the apostles, whose ‘trajectory’ from the New Testament offers a different vision of Christianity's development than do the Pastoral Epistles and ‘mainstream’ Christianity of the second and third centuries. In 1983, Corpus Christianorum established a Series Apocryphorum, which continues to produce new editions of these texts. Building on the work of François Bovon, Eric Junod, and others, scholars have analysed the ways in which women, gender, asceticism, and the family have been portrayed in these writings (Davies 1980; MacDonald 1983; Burrus 1987; Valantasis 1997; Jacobs 1999; Davis 2001). Of special interest has been the role assigned to Mary Magdalene in some of the apocryphal acts and Gnostic materials (King 2003a). Among late ancient religions, ‘Gnosticism’ has in recent decades received ample and sympathetic treatment. The mid-twentieth-century finds at Nag Hammadi spurred an explosion of scholarship on the topic: during the 1970s, the journal Vigiliae Christianae devoted more space to Gnosticism than to any other single

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subject. From a quest for ‘origins’ and ‘influences’, and from a conceptualization of ‘Gnosticism’ as ‘Christian heresy’ that marked nineteenth- and much twentieth-century scholarship, newer treatments question whether the term ‘Gnosticism’ correctly categorizes the highly diverse Nag Hammadi texts (M. A. Williams 1996; King 2003b). Many studies of women and of female imagery in the Nag Hammadi texts were published, of which Karen King's edited volume, Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism (1988), remains central. Among other so-called ‘heresies’ receiving reconsideration, Arianism takes pride of place. Robert Gregg and Dennis Groh's Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (1981), Gregg's edition of papers on Arianism from the 1983 Oxford International Patristics Conference (Arianism: Historical and Theological Reassessments (1985)), Rowan Williams's Arius: Heresy and Tradition (1987), Daniel Williams's Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene—Arian Conflicts (1995), and the numerous essays of Christopher Stead and Maurice Wiles on the topic all signal a more sympathetic reception (Wiles 2003: 167)—while Lewis Ayres abandons the category of ‘Arians’ as an inadequate historical descriptor, considering it ‘Athanasius’ creation of a genealogical rhetoric' (Ayres 2004: 110). Studies of Priscillianism (Burrus 1995), Messalianism (Stewart 1991), and Origenism (E. A. Clark 1992) show how ‘heresy’ end p.22

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved appears differently in varied social and cultural frameworks. A special issue of the JECS (4/4 (1996)), ‘The Markings of Heresy: Body, Text, and Community in Late Ancient Christianity’, edited by Virginia Burrus, was devoted to reconsidering ‘heresy’. And Susanna Elm, Eric Rebillard, and Antonella Romano's edited volume, Orthodoxie, christianisme, histoire (2000), represents a lively contribution to the ongoing revision of traditional categories.

1.3 Bridges between Old and New 1.3.1 Theology Despite newer social and cultural approaches to the study of late ancient Christianity, it is not the case that theology has been abandoned. In some quarters, theology and history are being more satisfactorily integrated to construct a genuinely historical theology. Here, an instructive example is offered by J. Rebecca Lyman's Christology and Cosmology: Models of Divine Activity in Origen, Eusebius, and Athanasius (1993). Later constructions of ‘orthodoxy’, Lyman claims, provide no key to theological concerns of the second through mid-fourth centuries, and the imposition of such later models serves only to ‘obscure the actual history of early Christianity’ (Lyman 1993: 7, 161). Underscoring the diversity of early Christian theologies, Lyman invites readers to attend to how the varying cosmological models embraced by various early Christian writers correlate with the different communal settings in which they lived and worked, from urban study groups to an ascetically oriented, and imperially established, ecclesia (Lyman 1993: 9, 162–4). The function of religious language in its social-historical setting is Lyman's overall concern. A second example of ‘theology in a different mode’ is Virginia Burrus's ‘Begotten, Not Made’: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (2000). Far from abandoning the concept ‘patristics’, Burrus pursues it with vigour, borrowing ‘mental tools’ from French feminist theory. Here, the fathers ‘masculine’ Trinitarian language is interrogated with the tools of gender theory.

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1.3.2 Biblical Interpretation Another area that links traditional and newer scholarship is early Christian biblical interpretation. Customary distinctions, such as ‘Alexandria vs. Antioch’, have been modified (Schäublin 1974; O'Keefe 1997: 42; Louth 1983: 118; F. Young 1989), with stronger agreement that ‘figural representation belonged to all forms of early Christian exegesis’ (F. Young 1997: 259). Newer handbooks of patristic exegesis (Simonetti end p.23

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved 1994; Kannengiesser 2004), while in a traditional mode, provide resources for students of biblical interpretation. Of particular importance for studies of the fathers' biblical interpretation has been a renewed interest in allegory. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, allegory was decried by many Protestant scholars, whose deaf ear for its intricacies and spiritual power left them unsympathetic to the exegesis of (for example) Origen and Gregory of Nyssa (Crouzel 1993: 104; E. A. Clark 1999: 70–8). Championed decades ago by scholars from the Catholic tradition—Henri de Lubac (1959), Henri Crouzel (1964), and Bertrand de Margerie (1980) —allegory has been restored to the forefront of discussion, assisted by recent literary theorists' interest in the topic. Allegory is now seen not as so much as an embellishing trope, but as an interpretive practice that accomplishes ‘work’ of its own, as has been argued in David Dawson's Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (1992), Douglas Burton-Christie's The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (1993), Maureen Tilley's The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World (1997), Elizabeth Clark's Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (1999), Richard Layton's Didymus the Blind and His Circle in Late-Antique Alexandria (2004), and some essays in J. Den Boeft and M. L. van Poll-van de Lisdonk's edited volume, The Impact of Scripture in Early Christianity (1999). The relationship between ancient Jewish and Christian interpretive techniques has also received renewed attention (Boyarin 1993).

1.3.3 Material Culture Various forms and practices of material culture, such as early Christian art, archaeology, and inscriptions, have been the focus of recent study. Most students of early Christianity, not trained in art history or archaeology, have been largely ‘borrowers’ from scholars such as Thomas Mathews, Jas Elsner, Henry Maguire, Robert Nelson, Charles Barber, and Annabel Wharton. Archaeological explorations and the resulting epigraphical and other finds have yielded interesting results for early Christian studies: for example, William Tabbernee's study of ‘Montanists’ in Asia Minor (Tabbernee 1997, 2003). A group working on early North African Christianity, established in 1994–5, received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support their project ‘Devotion and Dissent: The Practice of Christianity in Roman Africa’. Headed by Robin Jensen and J. Patout Burns of Vanderbilt University, the group organizes conference sessions (soon to appear as a book) that explore how material culture, including attention to ritual practices, can illuminate the study of texts. Shrines and mosaics, amulets and relics, have come back ‘into their own’, as fascinating objects of study for scholars of late ancient Christianity (e.g. Brown 1981; Van Dam 1993; Frankfurter 1998; G. Clark 1999; Frank 2000; Constas 2002; Miller 1998, 2000, 2004, 2005). Through the ‘corporeal end p.24

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved imagination’ of late ancient writers, the holy was understood as present in matter—a claim considered dubious by philosophers and theologians a few centuries earlier (Miller, forthcoming). In the last decades, the material practices associated with reading and writing in Christian antiquity have been explored (Gamble 1995; Haines-Eitzen 2000). Reconsideration has been given to biography and hagiography, whose ‘map onto’ social reality has been critically scrutinized (Cox 1983; Hägg and Rousseau 2000; Krueger 2004). Moreover, recent scholars trace the intersection of textuality and ‘materiality’, especially in ascetic devotions and the writing of hagiography (Krueger 2004; Miller, forthcoming).

1.3.4 The New Cultural Theory By the 1990s, some scholars of late ancient Christianity were borrowing ‘mental tools’ from literary (and other) theory and from cultural studies more frequently than from the social sciences. Post-structuralist analysis of category construction has attracted interest—although, to be sure, scholars could analyse the development of categories (such as ‘religion’) without explicit reference to theory (e.g. Smith 1990, 1992). The constructed quality of religious categories has been a focus of interest in Denise Kimber Buell's Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (1999) and her Why This New Race?: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (2005), as well as in Dale Martin's Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (2004). In these works, the tools of ideology critique and post-colonial theory are brought to bear on ancient texts. Late ancient Christian studies in general, however, leapt from a theological to a social-historical orientation in the 1970s and 1980s; bypassing structuralism and other contemporary intellectual currents, the discipline was a late-comer to post-structuralist analysis. Overlooked in the rush for alignment with the social sciences was a point not then so obvious: that scholars of late ancient Christianity work, for the most part, on ‘high’ literary and philosophical texts that lend themselves well to theoretical analysis, not with native informants, nor with masses of data amenable to statistical analysis. Some representative essays suggesting these newer directions can be found in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies, edited by Dale Martin and Patricia Cox Miller (2005), and also in the essays and book (Grammar and the Christian Imagination in Late Antiquity) of Catherine Chin (2006, 2008). The renewed interest in early Christian texts as forms of literature is well illustrated in the work of three scholars of late ancient Christianity: Averil Cameron, Mark Vessey, and Patricia Cox Miller. In contrast to Peter Brown's Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (1992), in which ‘persuasion’ is analysed as a social and political category, Averil Cameron's Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (1991) explores how texts link with social forms end p.25

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved to form ‘discourse’: Foucault's presence is here effectively signalled. Puzzling why scholars have been reluctant to examine early Christian texts as literature, Cameron summons her readers to consider the roles of figuration, narration, metaphor, and paradox in early Christian writing (Cameron 1991). As she puts it

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elsewhere, Christian writings from late antiquity should be read first as literary productions before they are read as sources of social data (Cameron 1997: 145)—a thesis suggested by the very title of her edited volume, History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History (1989). A similar theme informs the essays of Mark Vessey. Like Cameron, Vessey seeks to integrate the history of interpretation with social forms of reading, writing, and teaching. Vessey extends Brian Stock's notion of textual communities back into the early Christian period and invites scholars to explore ‘the functions and ideology of writing in late antiquity’ (Vessey 1991: 144, 158). In articles focusing on Augustine, Jerome, and Cassiodorus, Vessey elaborates how writers, texts, and audiences jointly produced competing modes of interpretation—and thus competing theologies—that enlisted different Christian clienteles (Vessey 1993b, 1998a, 2005). In ‘The Demise of the Christian Writer and the Remaking of “Late Antiquity”: From H.-I. Marrou's Saint Augustine (1938) to Peter Brown's Holy Man (1983)', Vessey (1998a), offers a respectful critique of historians who, in his view, neglect the textual quality of their evidence. Vessey notes Peter Brown's ‘tacit and tactical effacement, in the interests of a certain kind of vividness... of the products and procedures of ancient literacy’. Augustine's placement in an elite literary culture disappears from Brown's account in favour of the story of a man who lived his life ‘among men’ (Vessey 1998a: 382–3).13 By interpreting biography as ‘portraiture’, Vessey argues, Brown bypasses the literary quality of ancient texts (Vessey 1998a: 405). Likewise, Brown's ‘holy man’ essay that appeared in Representations (1983), Vessey argues, vests ‘the repraesentatio Christi... in the “vivid person” of the late antique holy man’, thus ‘circumvent[ing] one of the main challenges posed by such a “New Historicism” or “Cultural Poetics” [as undergirds the journal Representations], that of theorizing the interactions of text and society’ (Vessey 1998a: 409). Vessey's argument challenges the assumption that readers in our time can be brought ‘face-to-face’ with the ancients; a consideration of their literary representation is always demanded. Patricia Cox Miller's books and essays have provided elegant readings of late ancient texts. Informed by post-structuralist theory (primarily literary and psychoanalytical) and by deep reading in ancient and contemporary philosophy, her work itself enacts what reading patristic texts as literature, considered in social and historical context, might mean. From her exploration of dreams as an interpretive ‘language’ of late antiquity (Miller 1994), and her evocation of late ancient poetic images of bodies—bestial (Jerome's centaur), human and potentially blazing (Eustochium's), spectral (the witch of Endor's shade)—readers derive an enhanced appreciation of the patristic imaginary (Miller 2001). end p.26

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Analysing the creation and development of ‘patristics’—and then ‘early Christian studies’—adds an instructive chapter in the study of the institutional and intellectual aspects of a discipline's formation. Notes 1.

For ‘disciplinarity’ as an ancient as well as a modern concern, see discussions of Augustine's modification of the ancient disciplines in Pollman and Vessey (2005). We may note, with J. O'Donnell (2001: 203), that neither ‘late ancient studies’ nor ‘patristics’ is considered a ‘discipline’ by deans, provosts, and presidents of universities of our time; is the field in their eyes an ‘undiscipline’? 2. Schnorrenberg (2004). 3. For scepticism regarding the enterprise, see Waszink (1949); for praise,

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Burghardt (1950: 259–61). 4. From an anonymous review in the Christian Inquirer, praising the English translation of Neander's The History of the Christian Religion and Church, During the First Three Centuries, trans. Henry John Rose (Philadelphia: James M. Campbell & Co.; New York: Saxton & Miles, 1843). 5. On Wilamowitz's contribution of funds (solicited for his eightieth birthday present) to support the project, see Burghardt (1950: 261–3). 6. Gibbon, Autobiography, ed. Sheffield (London, 1907), 39, cited by Vessey (1993a: 186). 7. Henri Marrou expressed his scorn for this ‘grand captain of industry’, whose editorship reveals ‘more about business than about science’ (Marrou 1961: 82). 8. Aeterni patris in effect raised the status of Thomas to that of the pre-eminent doctrinal authority for Roman Catholics. 9. Recall Loisy's famous line, ‘Jesus foretold the Kingdom, and it was the Church that came’ (Loisy 1988: 145). Scholars now problematize Harnack's influence on French scholarship: he over-read ‘system’ into patristic writings (Crouzel 1993: 102–3, 105; Savon 1993: 114–15, 119). 10. Taylor argues that English Protestants were at a disadvantage, since both Romanists and Oxford divines knew far more about the history of the early church than do Taylor's readers (I. Taylor 1840: 34, 59), but accuses the Tractarians of hoodwinking the English public by passing over early Christian teachings that would be shocking to uninformed and simple-minded BibleProtestant Christians—such as the early Christian exultation of celibacy and lifelong virginity (pp. 99–102). Taylor declares that since he—independent of the established church, a married layman who is thoroughly exempt from ‘antiquarian enthusiasm’—has the patristic texts in hand, he is in a good position to inform his fellow countrymen of the real dangers to religion and morals lurking in those texts (pp. xv–xvii). Taylor's knowledge of the patristic writings is remarkable for his time and circumstances. 11. See the website . 12.

Peter Brown, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, JRS 61 (1971): 80–101 ; with some nuances and revisions in ‘The Saint as Exemplar in Late end p.27

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Antiquity’, Representations, 1 (1983): 1–25, and ‘Arbiters of the Holy: The Christian Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, in Brown (1995). The conference, ‘Charisma and Society: The 25th Anniversary of Peter Brown's Analysis of the Late Antique Holy Man’, was held 13–16 March, 1997, some papers from which were published in JECS 6 (1998). 13. Vessey cites the final paragraph of Brown (1967: 433) which in turn cites Possidius's Vita Augustini, 31. 9. Bibliography

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BRAKKE, D. (1995a), Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, OECS (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1995b), ‘The Problematization of Nocturnal Emissions in Early Christian Egypt, Syria, and Gaul’, JECS 3: 419–60. end p.28

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BRESSOLETTE, C. (1993), ‘L'Institut Catholique de Paris et la “science Allemande”’, in Fontaine et al. (1993), 193–210. BROCK, S. P. (1984), Syriac Perspectives on Late Antiquity (London: Variorum Reprints). —— (1992), Studies in Syriac Christianty: Collected Studies (Aldershot: Variorum). —— (1994a), ‘The Development of Syriac Studies’, in K. J. Cathcart (ed.), The Edward Hincks Bicentenary Lectures (Dublin: University College Department of Near Eastern Languages), 94–113. —— (1994b), ‘Syriac Studies in the Last Three Decades: Some Reflections’, in VI Symposium Syriacum 1992; Proceedings from University of Cambridge, 30 August–2 September 1992, R. Lavenant (ed.), OrChrAn 247 (Rome: Institium Pontificium Orientalium Studiorum), 13–29. —— (1997), A Brief Outline of Syriac Literature (Kottayam: St Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute). —— (1998), ‘Le monachisme syriaque: histoire et spiriualité’, in Le monachisme syriaque aux premiers siècles de l'Eglise: II e –début VII e siècle, Patrimoine Syriaque, Actes du Colloque, V (Antelias: CERP), 21–31. —— (1999), From Ephrem to Romanos: Interactions between Syriac and Greek in Late Antiquity (Aldershot: Variorum). —— and HARVEY , S. (1987), Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 13 (Berkeley: University of California Press).

BROOTEN, B. (1996), Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). BROWN, P. (1967), Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber).

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—— (1988), The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Lectures on the History of Religions, 13 (New York: Columbia University Press). —— (1992), Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). —— (1995), Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— (1997), ‘The World of Late Antiquity Revisited’, SO 72: 5–30. —— (1998), ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, 1971–1997’, JECS 6: 353–76. end p.29

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved BUELL, D. K. (1999), Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press). —— (2002), ‘Race and Universalism in Early Christianity’, JECS 10: 429–68.

—— (2005), Why This New Race?: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press). BURGHARDT, W. (1950), ‘Current Theology: Current Patristic Projects’, TS 11: 259–74. BURRUS, V. (1987), Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of Apocryphal

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Acts, Studies in Women and Religion, 23 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press).

—— (1991), ‘The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Alexander, Athanasius, Epiphanius, and Jerome’, HTR 84: 229–48. —— (1994), ‘Word and Flesh: The Bodies and Sexuality of Ascetic Women in Christian Antiquity’, JFSR 10: 27–51. —— (1995), The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy, Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 24 (Berkeley: University of California Press). —— (1996) (ed.), ‘The Markings of Heresy: Body, Text, and Community in Late Ancient Christianity’, JECS 4/4: 403–513. —— (2000), ‘Begotten Not Made’: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press).

—— (2004), The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). BURTON-CHRISTIE, D. (1993), The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press).

CAMERON, A. (1989) (ed.), History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press). —— (1991), Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse, Sather Classical Lectures, 55 (Berkeley: University of California Press). —— (1997), ‘Eusebius’ Vita Constantini and the Construction of Constantine’, in M. J. Edwards and S. Swain (eds.), Portraits: Biographical Representations in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 145–74. —— , and GARNSEY , P. (1998) (eds.), The Cambridge Ancient History, xiii: The Late Empire, A.D. 337–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

CASTELLI, E. (1986), ‘Virginity and Its Meaning for Women's Sexuality in Early Christianity’, JFSR 2: 61–88. —— (2004), Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making, Gender, Theory, and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press). CATRICE, P. (1985), ‘L'Orientaliste Paul Drach, Collaborateur de l'Abbé Migne’, in

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Mandouze and Fouilheron (1985), 211–24. CHADWICK, H. (1982), ‘The Patristic Greek Lexicon’, in C. F. D. Moule (ed.), G. W. H. Lampe, Christian, Scholar, Churchman: A Memoir by Friends (London: Mowbray), 66–72. CHARTIER, R. (1995), ‘The World as Representation’ (1989), excerpted in J. Revel and L. Hunt (eds.), trans. A. Goldhammer et al., Histories: French Constructions of the Past, The New Press Postwar French Thought, R. Naddaff (ser. ed.), i (New York: New Press), 544–58. CHAUSSY , Y. (1989), Les Bénédictines de Saint-Maur, Tome i: Aperçu historique sur la Congregation (Paris: L'Institut d'études augustiniennes). CHERRY , C. (1995), Hurrying Toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press).

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved CHIN, C. M. (2008), Grammar and the Christian Imagination in Late Antiquity, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). —— (2006), ‘Origen and Christian Naming: Textual Exhaustion and the Boundaries of Gentility in Commentary on John 1’, JECS 14: 407–16.

CLARK, E. A. (1979), Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends: Essays and Translations, Studies in Women and Religion, 1 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press).

—— (1983) (ed.), Women in the Early Church (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier). —— (1984), The Life of Melania, the Younger: Introduction, translation, and commentary (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press). —— (1986), Ascetic Piety and Women's Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press). —— (1989), ‘Foucault, The Fathers, and Sex’, JAAR 56: 619–41. —— (1992), The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press). —— (1999), Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

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—— , and FERGUSON, E. (1993), ‘Editors' Note’, JECS 1: pp. v–vi. CLARK, G. (1993), Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1999), ‘Victricius of Rouen: Praising the Saints’, JECS 7: 365–99.

COAKLEY , S. (1996), ‘“Batter my heart...”? On Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity’, in G. Gilbert (ed.), The Papers of the Henry Luce III Fellows in Theology (Atlanta: Scholars Press), i. 49–68. CONSOLINO, F. E. (1986), ‘Modelli di comportamento e modi di santificazione per l'aristocrazia femminile d'Occidente’, in A. Giardina (ed.), Società romana e impero tardoantico (Rome: Laterza), i. 273–306. —— (1988), ‘Il Monachesimo femminile nella tarda Antichità’, Codex Aquilarensis, 2: 33–45. CONSTAS, N. (2002), ‘An Apology for the Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity: Eustratius Presbyter of Constantinople, On the State of Souls after Death (CPG 7522)’, JECS 10: 267–85. COOPER, K. (1996), The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). —— , and LEYSER, C. (2000), ‘The Gender of Grace: Impotence, Servitude, and Manliness in the Fifth-century West’, Gender & History, 12: 536–51.

CORRINGTON, G. P. (1986), ‘Anorexia, Asceticism, and Autonomy: Self-Control as Liberation and Transcendence’, JFSR 2: 51–61. COUNTRYMAN, L. W. (1980), The Rich Christian in the Church of the Early Empire: Contradictions and Accommodations, Texts and Studies in Religion, 7 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press). COWE, S. P. (1990–1), ‘Tendentious Translation and the Evangelical Imperative: Religious Polemic in the Early Armenian Church’, Revue des études arméeniennes,

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end p.31

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved DAVIES, S. L. (1980), The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press).

DAVIS, S. J. (2001), The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women's Piety in Late Antiquity, OECS (Oxford: Oxford University Press). —— (2002), ‘Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex: Intertextuality and Gender in Early Christian Legends of Holy Women Disguised as Men’, JECS 10: 1–36.

DAWSON, D. (1992), Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press). DEN BOEFT, J., and VAN POLL-VAN DE LISDONK, M. L. (1999), The Impact of Scripture in Early Christianity, in Suppl. VC: Texts and Studies of Early Christian Life and Language, 44 (Leiden: E. J. Brill). DIGESER, E. D. (2000), The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius and Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Divjak, J. (1981) (ed.), Sancti Aureli Augustini opera: Epistolae ex duobus codicibus nuper in lucem prolatae, CSEL 88 (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky).

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FONTAINE, J. (1984), ‘Les laïcs et les études patristiques latines dans l'université française au XXe siècle’, RBen 94: 444–61. —— (1993), ‘Avant-propos’, in Fontaine et al. (1993), pp. xi–xvi. ——’Herzog, R., and Pollmann, K. (1993) (eds.), Patristique et antiquité tardive en Allemagne et en France de 1870 à 1930: Influences et échanges, Actes du Colloque franco-allemand de Chantilly; 25–7 octobre 1991, Études augustiniennes, série Moyen Age et temps modernes, 27 (Paris: L'Institut d'études augustiniennes). FOUCAULT, M. (1978–86), The History of Sexuality, i: An Introduction; ii: The Use of Pleasure; iii: The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Random House). end p.32

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved FOUILLOUX, E. (1995), La Collection ‘Sources Chrétiennes': Editer les Pères de l' église au XX

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FOWDEN, G. (1993), Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press). FRANK, G. (2000), The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity, Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 32 (Berkeley: University of California Press). Frankfurter, D. (1998) (ed.), Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, 134 (Leiden: E. J. Brill). FREDOUILLE, J. (1993), ‘Tertullien en Allemagne et en France de 1870 à 1930’, in Fontaine et al. (1993), 93–101.

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FREDRIKSEN, P. (1995), ‘Excaecati Occulta Justitia Dei: Augustine on Jews and Judaism’, JECS 3: 299–324. —— (1999), ‘Secundum Carnem: History and Israel in the Theology of St. Augustine’, in W. E. Klingshirn and M. Vessey (eds.), The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R. A. Markus, Recentiores: Later Latin Texts and Contexts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 26–41. —— (2006), Augustine and the Jews (New York: Doubleday). Frishman, J., and Van Rompay, L. (1997) (eds.), The Book of Genesis in Jewish and Oriental Christian Interpretation (Louvain: Peeters). FUGMANN, J., and POLLMAN, K. (1993), ‘Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Tendenzen zwischen Frankreich und Deutschland in der Patristik von 1870–1930 am Beispiel von Rezensionen’, in Fontaine et al. (1993), 239–71. GAMBLE, H. Y. (1995), Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press). Garsoïan, N. G., Mathews, T., and Thomson, R. (1982) (eds.), East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks).

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GOEHRING, J. (1999), Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism, SAC (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International). Gregg, R. C. (1985) (ed.), Arianism: Historical and Theological Reassessments, PMS 11 (Philadelphia: The Philadelphia Patristic Foundation). ——’and GROH, D. E. (1981), Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). GRIFFITH, S. H. (1992), Arabic Christianity in the Monasteries of Ninth-Century Palestine (Aldershot: Variorum). —— (1994), ‘Julian Saba, “Father of the Monks” of Syria’, JECS 2: 175–216.

—— (1995), ‘Asceticism in the Church of Syria: The Hermeneutics of Early Syrian Monasticism’, in Wimbush (1995), 220–45. —— (2002), The Beginnings of Christian Theology in Arabic: Muslim—Christian

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved GRUBBS, J. E. (1995), Law and Family in Late Antiquity: The Emperor Constantine's Marriage Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Hägg, T., and Rousseau, P. (2000) (eds.), Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity, Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 31 (Berkeley: University of California Press). HAINES-EITZEN, K. (2000), Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (New York: Oxford University Press).

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved JOHNSON, S. F. (2006), The Life and Miracles of Thekla: A Literary Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Jones, A. H. M., Martindale, J. R., and Morris, J. (1980–92) (eds.), PLRE, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved MARTIN, D. B. (2004), Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). ——’and Miller, P. Cox (2005) (eds.), The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved O'DONNELL, J. J. (2005), Augustine: A New Biography (New York: HarperCollins).

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TILLEY , M. (1997), The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). end p.39

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved TORJESEN, K. J. (1993), When Women Were Priests: Women's Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco). TREU, U. (1993), ‘Die Kirchenväter-Kommission’, in Fontaine et al. (1993), 227–35. TROUT, D. (1994), ‘Re-textualizing Lucretia: Cultural Subversion in the City of God’, JECS 2: 53–70. —— (1999), Paulinus of Nola: Life, Letters, and Poems, Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 27 (Berkeley: University of California Press). TURNER, V., and TURNER, E. (1978), Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives, Lectures on the History of Religions, NS 11 (New York: Columbia University Press). VALANTASIS, R. (1997), The Gospel of Thomas (London: Routledge).

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Wimbush, V. L. (1990) (ed.), Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook, SAC (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). ——’and Valantasis, R. (1995) (eds.), Asceticism (New York: Oxford University Press). YOUNG, F. M. (1989), ‘The Rhetorical Schools and their Influence on Patristic Exegesis’, in R. Williams (ed.), The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 182–99.

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—— (1997), Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). YOUNG, S. (1994), ‘Being a Man: The Pursuit of Manliness in The Shepherd of Hermas’, JECS 2: 237–55. end p.41

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [42]-[65]

2 Literature, Patristics, Early Christian Writing Mark Vessey Abstract: Literary Methodologies – Before Literature: The Rise of Christian Letters in the West – Under Literature: Early Christian Writing between the Enlightenment and Late Modernism – After Literature: Rehistoricizing Early Christian Writing Keywords: Christ, Enlightenment, Modernism, Christian

2.1 Literary Methodologies O NE of the earliest appearances of the neo-Latin term methodologia, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. ‘methodology’), is in a handbook of historical theology by J. F. Buddeus (1727). The same writer provides a classic definition of ‘patristic theology’ as a science of the consensual ‘mind and opinion of the Fathers’—that is, of accredited teachers of the early church.1 The source material for such a science was the body of written work attributed to the fathers as ‘authors’, by then extensively published and inventoried in print. Among bibliographical catalogues familiar to Buddeus would have been William Cave's Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum historia literaria, or ‘Literary History of Church Writers’ (1688–98), a chronological directory of Christian authors and their works from the preaching of Jesus Christ to the publishing of the opera omnia of Martin Luther. For Cave's readers, ecclesiastical ‘literary history’ meant a traversal of the textual archive of Christian doctrine and practice of past centuries, informed by a present understanding of the church. Both the idea of historia literaria and the term itself were novelties of the late Renaissance, inspired in part by Reformation-era end p.42

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved apologetics: disputes over the descent of the ‘true’ church had set a new premium on written testimony. Underpinning the new coinage, nonetheless, was the ordinary and ancient sense of the Latin adjective lit(t)erarius, ‘pertaining to what is written and read’. There was no reference to what would now count for us as ‘literary’. Because it is cognate with ‘literature’, the adjective ‘literary’ nowadays typically signals a particular concern with a privileged subset of literary, as opposed to non-literary, texts. This more exclusive, implicitly canonical sense of the ‘literary’ is scarcely attested before the end of the eighteenth century and did not become widespread until the nineteenth. Its retrojection on to the writings of early Christianity poses immediate problems of definition and conceptualization. How do we distinguish more from less ‘literary’ texts of the early Christian centuries? Where or when is the line to be drawn? What do we take ourselves to mean by

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‘literary’ in such contexts? The failure to address these basic questions of language and method is a weakness of many contemporary scholarly treatments of early Christian (so-called) literature and literary texts. Rather than propose a single, generally applicable literary methodology for early Christian studies—which would be impractical—or describe the many and varied, more and less self-consciously ‘literary’ methodologies nowadays applied in the field—which, even if possible, would risk being largely uninstructive—this chapter attempts to bring some clarity to current discussions by supplying elements of a genealogy of terms and methods hitherto in use. By observing past approaches to the ‘letter’ of early Christian texts, we may come to see more sharply what is at stake in our own. We shall, in any case, be reminded of the substantial dependence of modern idioms of text-based, ‘literary’ knowledge—including, at the limit, the privileged idiom of ‘literature’ itself—on western, Latin, Christian institutions.

2.2 Before Literature: The Rise of Christian Letters in the West Texts of writers confessing Christ were subjected early on to what would now be called ‘literary’ analysis. Augustine's discernment of levels of rhetorical style in passages of the apostle Paul, Cyprian, and Ambrose (Doctr. chr. 4. 20. 39–21. 50) is a locus classicus. ‘Literary’ study of early Christian texts, in something like the modern sense, is thus at least as old as the idea of the ‘fathers’ as a distinct category of approved Christian authors, a classification first clearly formulated (c. 434) by the Gallo-Roman monk Vincent of Lérins in his Commonitorium (Madoz 1933; Sieben 1979: 149–70). Nothing, however, in the ‘classical’ (GraecoRoman) or Christian formation of men like Vincent and Augustine could have led them to postulate the end p.43

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved modern disciplinary category of ‘literature’, which we apply to their works at our peril. To appreciate the distinctions they made, we need to return to the vocabulary of ‘letters’ that they inherited, and that—their contributions aside—would remain largely unchanged in the West until the end of the eighteenth century.

2.2.1 The Roman Vocabulary of Letters The discourse-critical practice of Augustine and his contemporaries, like that of Cicero or Quintilian, was rhetorical and formalist, learned as part of a lifestyle, applicable equally to the production and reception of texts. Artistic verbal expression across a range of oral and written genres was the badge of a well-educated citizen of the Graeco-Roman world. The fully ‘literate’ person (Lat. litteratus,-a) not only knew the alphabet; he or she was capable of persuasive speech and writing.2 Poetry and history had special rules. Utilitarian forms (e.g. compendia, handbooks) had their own formal conventions. None of these observances rent the universe of respectable discourse asunder between the ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’. All kinds of transmissible knowledge worth the attention of freeborn individuals, not only those included in summary lists of the ‘liberal’ arts or disciplines, belonged in principle to the common stock of ‘letters’ (Gk. grammata, Lat. litterae), in the sense of ‘learning’, ‘body of knowledge’, ‘intellectual culture’. This was ‘literature’ in the ancient understanding: the plenary resources of an elite literacy, or the personal possession of them (Quinn 1979: 2–3; Schadewaldt 1973). The Latin term litteratura, in place of the usual litterae, was very occasionally used to denote it.3 The rest was mere writing or

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talk.

2.2.2 The New Christian Literacy: De doctrina christiana Christians had writing and talk of their own, including special writings (Gk. hai graphai, Lat. scripturae) in a variety of genres—the Old and New Testaments—and edifying talks (Gk. homiliai, Lat. sermones) that commonly cited or echoed those prior ‘scriptural’ texts.4 At the end of the fourth century, as Latin-reading Christians grew increasingly self-conscious in their application of such categories, Augustine began his handbook De doctrina christiana by announcing ‘certain guidelines for dealing with (the) scriptures (scripturae)’. These guidelines were designed to assist Christians both in their reading of writers who had already uncovered the hidden sense of the ‘divine letters’ and in their own efforts to expound the same scriptures to others, in whatever medium.5 In giving rules for a rhetorical style proper to Christian discourse, Augustine was notably sensitive to the settings in which ‘scriptural’ teaching and learning occurred. He insisted, for example, that the rule of favouring clear expression, even at the cost of correctness, applied ‘not end p.44

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved only in conversation... but also and especially when one is to hold forth in public [i.e. deliver a sermon]’ (4. 10. 25). The ideal Christian speaker and teacher would thus be ready on any occasion to appear less than a perfect master of the norms of classical eloquence, for the sake of a more powerful, ultimately divine persuasion. In Augustine's book, the handling of Christian canonical scripture in speech and writing constantly threatens or promises to breach the limits of ‘letters’ as a measure of elite Roman culture (Auerbach 1965: 27–66; Banniard 1992: 65–104). De doctrina christiana (begun 396/7, completed c.,427) is not only the first true handbook of Christian studies, but also possibly the single most influential essay in literary methodology ever written (Schäublin 1995; Markus 1996). Though indebted to ancient philological, rhetorical, and philosophical models, it cannot be reduced to any combination of them (Pollmann 1996; 2005). Nor, despite prefatory appearances, was it simply a digest of received Christian wisdom. Other Christian thinkers before Augustine, Greek and Latin, had reflected on many of the same issues of hermeneutical theory and exegetical-rhetorical method and, at several points, come to similar conclusions. The shared property of ancient liberal learning virtually guaranteed as much (Young 1997; Eden 1997: 41–63). None, however, had attempted to conceive an entire programme of Christian learning and teaching in terms of individual and ultimately communal relationships to the sacred ‘letters’ of canonical scripture, on the one hand, and to the available resources of non-biblical or ‘secular’ disciplinary knowledge, on the other. Together, the universality of Augustine's prescriptions and the inherent tension within them between Christian and non-Christian disciplinarities distinguished his programme from those of any of his precursors. Augustine's concern with ‘letters’ embraces far more than the two curricular disciplines seemingly most akin to ‘literature’ in the modern sense: namely, grammar (correct speech, interpretation of the poets) and rhetoric (composition, style, performance). Literacy in his understanding was the portal to an immense store of knowledge, of which all the more useful, less deceptive parts were henceforth to be committed to the task of scriptural interpretation. When he names those parts (Doct. chr. 2. 19. 29 ff.), he does so in the wake of the Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro (d. 27 BCE), whose scheme of the liberal arts as a unified system of knowledge was still standard in late antiquity and, despite

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Augustine's overwriting of it in De doctrina christiana, would survive largely intact in later centuries beside—or more often, embedded in—the alternative model of a Christian, scripture-centred universe of letters (Shanzer 2005). Augustine's ordering of readerly relations to Christian scripturae and the generality of litterae was once described, with some misgivings, as ‘the founding charter of a Christian culture’ (Marrou 1938: 413). It merits that description, provided we recognize that it was only gradually so acclaimed, and that the ‘Christian culture’ in question was from the start, and long remained, specific to the Latin-reading West. Whatever measures of Greek philosophy and theology Augustine imbibed in end p.45

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved translation, his intellectual culture, including his Hellenism, was of a fundamentally Latin-Roman cast. As Virgil was to him the Roman poet and Cicero the Roman philosopher-orator par excellence, so Varro (in De civitate dei and elsewhere) stood for the sum of previous Latin erudition across all disciplines, human and divine (O'Daly 1999: 236–8). Varro's prolific encyclopaedism was itself the product of a Roman will to encompass and surpass the achievements of the Greeks in the higher arts, the expression of a rising colonial power with a cultural inferiority complex (Rawson 1985; compare Marrou 1949: 696–9). When Augustine had to consider how the texts and teachings of Christianity could be articulated within the cultural institutions of the late Empire, it was to this politicized vision of Roman universal knowledge that he repeatedly returned. The Christian encyclopaedia that he promulgated in works such as De doctrina christiana, Confessiones, and De civitate dei was no less ambitious for being predicated on love of God and neighbour. It would shape the disciplinarity of Latin Christendom and its successor states down to the present day.

2.2.3 Divine and Human Letters, or the Great Schism Like its purported universality, the underlying tension between ‘scriptural’ and ‘liberal’ learning that characterizes Augustine's literary methodology and much subsequent Western disciplinary thinking is originally Latin. Greek Christian readers of Augustine's time and earlier could make the same broad division, without feeling constrained to specify the limits of accommodation as scrupulously as he did. In giving advice To the Young on the positive value of Greek learning, Basil of Caesarea spoke for a comfortable consensus. Almost the only signs of friction, in the Greek sphere, between the disciplinary norms of late antique Hellenism and the profession of Christianity relate to the emperor Julian's bizarre endeavour, in 362, to ban Christians from the teaching of grammar and rhetoric, for which he was criticized even by the ‘pagan’ historian Ammianus Marcellinus (22. 10. 7; 25. 4. 20). Otherwise, traditionally educated Christians in the eastern part of the Empire distinguished hygienically between Greek ‘literature [sic] and intellectual reflection’, which they could safely adopt, and Greek ‘mythology with its concomitant cults’, which they naturally rejected (Bowersock 1990: 12). The modern scholarly notion of a generalized conflict between Christian and classical literary values in late antiquity has no support in the Byzantine tradition. In fact, the only long-term repercussions of Julian's edict were in the West, where Jerome's hallucination of being flogged for following Cicero instead of Christ (Ep. 22. 30) melodramatically transposed the heroics of a bygone age of martyrs into the key of an artificial, Julianic separation of politico-religious cultures. Although Jerome echoed Tertullian, whose sometimes negative evaluation of the ordinary intellectual culture of his time provides a natural

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reference point for scholarship end p.46

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved (e.g. Hagendahl 1983), his attempt to erect an imaginary firewall between divine and human readings was more than a little eccentric in a Christian writer of the post-Constantinian era. Eccentric, and extraordinarily successful. After Jerome, scenes and narratives of Christian ‘literary conversion’ proliferated, above all in ascetic—and, initially, aristocratic—milieux. Augustine, whose earlier writings betray an attitude closer to that of the Greeks (and to Jerome's actual practice), made a glittering addition to the company of reformed intellectuals with his Confessions, parts of which can be read as a silent agon with Jerome.

2.2.4 The Line of ‘Scriptural’ Writers: Church History as Bibliography As well as adopting a toned-down version of Jerome's histrionic account of Christian literate choices, Augustine took wary note (Ep. 40. 2, 9; 75. 3) of his advocacy of a tradition of trans-generic Christian writing ‘on the scriptures’ that would extend from the New Testament to the present, as set forth in the catalogue De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (‘On Church Writers’), otherwise De viris illustribus (‘On Famous Men’), of 392/3. In this chronological bio-bibliography, prototype for many later such compilations, Jerome drew on the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea for the pre-Nicene period, but only in order to extract information on Christian authors from his predecessor's much broader historical narrative. In combination with his Chronicle, likewise adapted from Eusebius, Jerome's Church Writers would largely displace the full-dress, Eusebian kind of ecclesiastical historiography in the West until the Reformation. His most immediate formal models in this case were the Latin bio-bibliographies of Varro and Suetonius. As those earlier writers had taken stock of the intellectual resources of an ascendant, expansionist Roman polity, Jerome now asserted the monopoly of a new regime of Christian writing in, or rendered into, Latin. Henceforth, at least in theory, these texts would comprise the only ‘letters’ worth possessing for themselves. Like Augustine's De doctrina christiana, Jerome's De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis is a western initiative, as inalienably Latinophone in its way as the ‘Vulgate’ translation of the Bible. The only comparable Greek Christian bio-bibliography for several centuries to come would be a translation of Jerome's (Blum 1983: 42–52, 97, 132–6).

2.2.5 Methodologia perennis: The Afterlife of Handbooks By the later sixth century in the West—the period of Benedict, Cassiodorus, and Gregory the Great—the scripturally oriented programme of Christian studies outlined by Jerome and Augustine had become normative (Markus 1990; Vessey 2004). Few works were more sedulously copied during the Middle Ages than the twin end p.47

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved handbooks De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (McKitterick 1989: 192–210; 2004: 221–6, 235–44) and De doctrina christiana (Gorman 1985; English 1995). As late as the heyday of Scholasticism, the most innovative students of Latin

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Christian hermeneutics and poetics still deferred to such authorities (Wawrykow 1995; Ocker 2002). The Renaissance discovery of ‘Antiquity’ in turn ensured that the same texts would enjoy a fresh vogue as documents of an authentically ancient Christian culture, even if Petrarch and his successors had to downplay the violence of Jerome's Ciceronian ‘dream’ (Rice 1985: 85–7) and exaggerate the scope of Augustine's advice on the proper use of pagan learning (Doct. chr. 2. 40. 60–42. 63: ‘spoiling of the Egyptians’). Not surprisingly, Basil of Caesarea's serene counsel To the Young was used for want of better warrants from Latin fathers (Wilson 1992: 14–16). When the young Erasmus (1466–1536) began drafting an apology for humanist literary values, The Antibarbarians, he took his co-ordinates from De doctrina christiana and De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis. Later, Augustine's handbook served him as primary model for the treatise on biblical interpretation that he prefixed to the second edition (1519) of his epoch-making Greek and Latin New Testament, the Ratio seu methodus verae theologiae (‘Theory or Method of True Theology’) (Béné 1969: 59–91, 215–80, 434–6). With these Erasmian manifestos, so integrally related to the educational reforms of Renaissance humanism and the ensuing Reformations of the western church, we come to the threshold of the history of patristics as a modern theological discipline, as defined already by Buddeus in 1727 (see Backus 2003 on the immediate pre-history of patristics).

2.3 Under Literature: Early Christian Writing between the Enlightenment and Late Modernism In the course of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the vocabulary of letters in modern European languages registered three successive, related semantic shifts: Activization. Besides denoting the accumulated intellectual resources of a culture or an individual's purported mastery of them (as in the Roman and post-Roman vocabulary of litterae), ‘letters’ and ‘literature’ now also came to be used for the contemporary production or profession of ‘writing’. It was in this sense that Thomas Carlyle would single out Samuel Johnson, Robert Burns, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as specimens of that new breed of heroes, the ‘man of letters’ (Carlyle 1841). The new man of letters, or writer, was paid in proportion to the commercial success of his published work. end p.48

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Objectification. Without losing its inclusive reference to all reputable genres and disciplines, the word ‘literature’ began to specify, in particular, the total deposit of literary works of a given period or nation—that is, a clearly delimited body of writings. The later eighteenth century saw the first appearance in Europe of works of national bibliography and literary historiography composed in languages other than Latin and with ‘literature’ in their titles. Specialization. Finally, as part of the movement of Romanticism, the scope of ‘literature’ narrowed in certain applications to a few highly artistic forms: poetry, drama, superior prose fiction, selected non-fictional prose. Thus we arrive at length at the familiar ‘restricted sense’ of the word, as ‘applied to writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect’, a sense still qualified by English lexicographers in 1903 as ‘of very recent emergence’ (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘literature’; see further Escarpit 1958: 1738–41; Williams 1976: 150–4; Widdowson 1999: 31–41). For two centuries or so after the Reformation, the title ‘literary history’ (historia lit[t]eraria) was used to signal a historical inventory of the resources of one or

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more arts or sciences, howsoever defined (Cristin 1973: 96–109). Cave's Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum historia literaria or ‘Literary History of Church Writers’ is an example of the genre, delimited in that case by a sense of ‘ecclesiastical writing’ as old as Jerome's De viris illustribus or De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis. In the late eighteenth century, the European sense of ‘literary history’ began to shift towards the more aesthetically inflected definition of ‘literature’ just given. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's account of his own intellectual and artistic development, the Biographia Literaria (1817), plays on the contemporary awareness of innovation: as there could now be a history of literature (in the new sense), so there could be a biography of one of its exponents, himself a poet and critic. In fact, the commonest way of thinking about the history of literature was as a kind of biography with a ‘suprapersonal entity’ as its subject. In the wake of Romanticism, that entity was regularly construed as ‘the character or “mind” of a race, region, people, or nation’, corresponding ‘to what Dilthey, with reference to historiography in general, call[ed] “ideal unities” or “logical subjects”’, among which Dilthey also counted religions (Perkins 1992: 2–3). If modern nation-states were henceforth to be the subjects of new-style literary histories, why not then too the self-proclaimed race of Christians (see already Chateaubriand 1802)? How would the earliest phases of Christianity appear in such a light?

2.3.1 Patristics as Literary History The idea of reformulating patristics as a species of ‘Christian literary history’ was announced in the title of a posthumously published work by the Roman Catholic historian and theologian Johann Adam Möhler (1840), but it was an article published end p.49

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved twenty-five years later by the Protestant Friedrich Nitzsch that first sparked serious interest in it. Nitzsch argued that the new (Protestant) science of Dogmengeschichte (‘history of dogmas’) had rendered patristics otiose as a theological discipline. What now went by the name of patristics was really ‘patrology’, which, lacking any true rationale of its own, offered only ‘a conglomerate or aggregate of biographical and literary notices, arranged in chronological order’ (Nitzsch 1865: 46; see also n. 1). The way to save patristics as an academic discipline was to redefine it clearly as ‘ecclesiastical literary history’. Since the interest of early Christian writing, according to Nitzsch, lay chiefly in its content, the aim of this new discipline would still be to provide ‘a history of theology [sic] in its foundation period’ (p. 55 ). Nitzsch's proposal was taken up and turned on its head by another German Protestant theologian, Franz Overbeck, in a famous article ‘On the Beginnings of Patristic Literature’. Overbeck imagined someone contemplating the in-folio editions of the church fathers, wondering what this ‘literature’ was and how it came into being. ‘In vain’, he wrote, ‘would such a person turn to any of the handbooks of patristics currently available’ (Overbeck 1882: 417). What was lacking was a genuinely literary-historical account of the fathers. Since ‘the history of literature lies in its forms’, Overbeck continued, contradicting Nitzsch, the task of any reconstituted patristics would be to provide a Formengeschichte, or ‘history of forms’, of early Christian writing (p. 423 , emphasis added). Not, however, of all early Christian writing. Against the bibliographical tradition of Jerome, Cave, and others, Overbeck distinguished sharply between ‘Christian proto-literature’ (christliche Urliteratur), meaning primarily the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers, and ‘patristic literature’ proper, beginning with the apologists. The difference, as he saw it, was that the latter, unlike the former,

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derived its character as literature from Hellenistic-Roman models of expression. Patristic literature began when Christian writers strategically adopted the rhetorical and formal-generic repertoire of ‘pagan’' culture, which they did for the sake of evangelization rather than out of any desire to appear as literary figures. ‘The church fathers are writers (Schriftsteller) against their will,’ asserted Overbeck, citing Clement of Alexandria's reprise (Strom. 1. 1) of Plato's doubts about the fitness of writing as a medium of philosophical instruction (p. 447 ). ‘Setting aside the literature of Christian origins’, he concluded, ‘we are left with a definition of patristic literature as Graeco-Roman literature of Christian confession and Christian interest’ (p. 444 ). Overbeck's emphasis on artistic form and his apology for the fathers as authors despite themselves reflected the latest trends in European literary historiography. From being witnesses to Christian doctrine and institutions, the fathers had become, not merely ‘writers’, but producers of a reputed ‘literature’ that now filled several hundred volumes of J.-P. Migne's Patrologia (1844–66; Bloch 1994). It was around this time, too, that the hero of J. K. Huysmans's novel A Rebours (1884) picked his way fastidiously through the Latin fathers, as part of a larger selection of ‘decadent’ literary classics. end p.50

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved The idea that a history might be written of ancient Christian literature to set beside the latest histories of, say, French or English literature inspired several younger scholars, including Adolf Harnack, the third (unpublished) part of whose Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius (1893–1904) was to have made literary-historical sense of the vast documentation included in the first two. Although Overbeck had given no clear instructions, it was assumed that his projected ‘history of forms’ would be founded on a taxonomy of literary genres (Gattungen). The experiment was tried, without much success (Jordan 1911; see Tetz 1967: 25–6). Meanwhile, ‘patrologies’, or chronological bibliographies of early Christian writers, continued to appear, some of them optimistically styled ‘literary histories’. Looking back on more than half a century of such productions in 1947, Joseph de Ghellinck had to concede that there had been little methodological advance since Overbeck (de Ghellinck 1947: 149–80, at 161). De Ghellinck's harsh verdict covered not only the latest patrologies, but also sundry efforts by classical philologists to incorporate early Christian writings into their histories and handbooks of Greek and Roman literature. Overbeck's proposals had caught the spirit of a powerful movement of German ancienthistorical scholarship, which—after Vico, Herder, and Hegel—called for the synoptic treatment of all cultural phenomena. As matter for the new Altertumswissenschaft promoted by the likes of Theodor Mommsen and Ulrich Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, early Christianity now fell within a general historical science of Mediterranean antiquity. Even as late as mid-century, however, it was still far from obvious what the most suitable methods might be for the study of Christian ‘literature’ of the later Graeco-Roman centuries.

2.3.2 The Literature(s) of Late Antiquity As de Ghellinck cast a backward eye over recent failed experiments in patristics as literary history, a handful of books appeared that can now be seen to mark an epoch in historical research on ‘Greco-Roman literature of Christian confession’' (Overbeck). These books had two traits in common: a readiness to treat ancient Christian ‘letters’' as part of a history unconfined by the Church, and a deep sensitivity to the crisis of Christian and classically humanist values brought on by the horrors of Nazism and the Second World War.

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Pierre Courcelle's Histoire littéraire des grandes invasions germaniques (1948) is ‘literary history’' in a revealingly anomalous sense: an account of the fifth- and sixth-century confrontations of Romans and ‘barbarians’ as related in contemporary texts, almost all of them Christian (and printed in Migne).6 If readers saw parallels with more recent history, the author suggested in his preface, they would only be following in the footsteps of the fathers, who liked to find prefigurations of their own times in biblical accounts of past events. The allusion to patristic end p.51

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved habits of ‘literal’ or ‘historical’ (re)interpretation of biblical narrative points to the mid-twentieth-century rediscovery of typological exegesis by French and other patristic scholars (e.g. Daniélou 1950; cf. Young 1994). It also recalls one of the leading motifs of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946, Eng. trans. 1953), another in this cluster of epochmarking books. In Auerbach's conspectus of ‘European’ literature from Homer to James Joyce, the patristic doctrine of typological or ‘figural’ understanding emerged as one of the primary sources of modern or novelistic literary realism, alongside Augustine's doctrine of the ideal Christian ‘plain style’, or sermo humilis, itself modelled on the language of the gospels (Auerbach 1953: 72–6, 554–6; 1965: 27–66). For Auerbach, the way in which the Latin church fathers read history into and out of the letter of their texts, beginning with the scriptures, was foundational for a (‘literary’) culture that included Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, that had culminated in the latest experiments of Modernism, but whose future, in 1946, was beyond divining. Auerbach and Courcelle were not alone in their figural readings. In wartime and immediately post-War Europe, the letter of patristic texts took on a sudden new weight of testimony, prophecy, and exemplarity. The series Sources Chrétiennes (1942–) was born at that hour (Bertrand 2002), in the same milieu—occupied Lyons—as Henri-Irénée Marrou's History of Education in Antiquity (1948, Eng. trans. 1956) and, coupled with it, the far-reaching ‘Retractatio’ (1949) to his thesis on Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (1938). A classically trained humanist and a Roman Catholic, Marrou wished to discern the process by which the intellectual culture of the ancient Greek and Roman cities had turned into the Christian, Bible-focused, clerical-monastic literacy of the medieval Latin West. At the heart of his enterprise was a reckoning with Augustine's De doctrina christiana, presented by him both as ‘the founding charter of a Christian culture’ (Marrou 1938: 413) and, upon further reflection, as the expression of a ‘Byzantine’ Christian-classical sensibility soon thereafter to be extinguished in the West (Marrou 1948: 328–9; 1949: 690–702). Was Augustine the first medieval man, or the last of the ancients? Resisting the dichotomy, while still keeping the Middle Ages at bay, Marrou finally adopted a German period-term for the later Roman centuries and called him a man of the Spätantike (‘late antiquity’). Although he elsewhere closely identified the new Christian culture of late antiquity with ‘The Golden Age of the Fathers of the Church’, c. 350–430 (Daniélou and Marrou 1963: 341–8), the ‘culture of late antiquity’ was not specifically Christian. It was a form of the ‘life of the mind’ common to Christians and non-Christians alike. This was the doubly epochmaking claim of Marrou's 1949 ‘Retractatio’, and one of the foundations for the later work in English of such scholars as Peter Brown and Robert Markus (Brown 1997; Vessey 1998; Markus, forthcoming). Marrou's researches on the structures of paideia and the liberal arts painstakingly respected the ancient vocabulary of letters. The essentially late modern, post-Romantic question ‘What is literature?’, posed by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1948

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and end p.52

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved presupposed by the whole subsequent discourse of ‘literary theory’, never troubled his texts. The same is true of the last work on this shelf of wartime books, Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948, Eng. trans. 1953), though for a different reason. Marrou's field of research was ‘letters’' in the classical understanding of the word: the intellectual resources of the educated elite. Curtius's subject was ‘literature’ in the Romantic sense defined above—active, objectified, specialized—but now made retroactively to englobe all that this scholar held most vital to the cultural tradition of the West. Literature for him was ‘the great intellectual and spiritual tradition of western culture as given form in language’ (Curtius 1953: p. x). It began with Homer, because the Greeks ‘found their past, their essential nature, and their world of deities ideally reflected in a poet’, rather than in a set of priestly books (p. 36 ). Quintilian, Curtius noted, used litteratura to translate Greek grammatik , grammar: ‘Thus [the word] does not at first mean literature in our sense; the litteratus is one who knows grammar and poetry... but is not necessarily a writer’ (p. 42 ; but see n. 2). Curtius never explained how in fact literature' had acquired its current sense. The original association of Latin litteratura with poetry was enough for his purpose. In his eyes, literature was poetry. His book plots the survival and creative transformation of ancient poetics from Macrobius in the fourth century to Goethe in the eighteenth. Despite their influence in other domains of literary study, neither Curtius's book nor Auerbach's elicited much response from students of early Christian texts. Instead, the great catalyst for future work in this domain was Marrou's choice of ‘late antiquity’ (Spätantike, antiquité tardive, tardo antico, etc.) as the master concept for a comprehensive cultural history. As Spätaltertumswissenchaft became the order of the day for historians, classical philologists revised the terms on which they approached early Christian and later classical texts. Rather than the exclusively ‘early Christian’ philology postulated at one point by Curtius (1953: 446), what emerged in French and other Continental European scholarship of the second half of the twentieth century was a newly inclusive science of the languages, works, authors, styles, and genres of the ‘literature’ (or cognate ‘literatures’) of late antiquity, in which the dividing line between Christian and non-Christian forms of expression was never settled but always to seek. The chief exponents of that science have been classical philologists with lay university appointments, though often working closely with patristic scholars. The most influential of them have been Latinists. A synopsis of their work may be found in the later volumes of the Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike (1989–, hereafter HLL). Two names will serve to mark the time and place in scholarship. From the same academic milieu as Courcelle and Marrou, though neither's pupil, Jacques Fontaine (b. 1922) was among the first to see how the discovery of ‘late antiquity’ made possible new departures in literary analysis and historiography.7 Patristics approached the works of Christian authors ‘as the treasure and deposit end p.53

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved of a homogeneous religious tradition’. Its focus was on the message rather than the media of transmission, on consensual mind rather than individual

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enunciation. Yet, insisted Fontaine, ‘the works of Christian authors... are first of all literary works’. Every author performs an ‘act of style’, and it is at the level of style, therefore, that ‘any properly literary analysis ought to be situated’ (Fontaine 1970: 6–7). The philologist's or literary historian's task was to demonstrate how the expressive forms of a culture were adapted on each occasion to a particular expressive intent, in a given setting. Applying Marrou's intuition of a common ‘late antique’' sensibility to works of verbal art, Fontaine would relocate early Christian texts within their original aesthetic horizon, in order to reassert their singularity as literary acts. The ‘literary conversion’ narratives of Jerome and his kind were not to be taken at face value. Even in the Latin West of the later fourth and early fifth centuries ‘a Christian writer remain[ed] a late antique author through and through’ (Fontaine 1982: 19; see also Fontaine 1984). By the early 1980s, the evolution of ‘forms’ of early Christian writing in Latin had been reconceived as part of a unified history of the Latin literature of late antiquity, itself implicitly conceived as part of a universal literary history.8 When the project of such a history of late antique Latin literature came before the public in volume v of the HLL, its manifesto was written by Reinhart Herzog (in Herzog 1989: 1–44; see further Herzog 2002). A long outdated predecessor handbook of classical Latin literature had divided the materials for later centuries between ‘national (i.e. Roman) literature’ and ‘Christian literature’. That barrier now came down: there was henceforth to be only one ‘literature’ of (Latin) late antiquity. The keynotes of Herzog's presentation of ‘late antiquity’ as a literaryhistoriographical period-concept were those already sounded by Fontaine and others: far-reaching community of ‘forms’' between Christian and non-Christian writers; prevalence of generic mixing and improvisation; decisiveness, for Latin literary history, of fourth-century Christian reflection on classical and biblical discursive norms. Whereas Fontaine, partly under the influence of Marrou, had favoured naturalistic metaphors for the relationship of Christian artistic forms to their larger cultural environment (‘osmosis’, ‘symbiosis’), Herzog applied a term with distinct literary-historiographical and literary-theoretical resonance: reception. The whole Latin literature of late antiquity was one of ‘productive reception’ (p. 33 ), specifically of the ‘reception of ancient literature’ across a range of ‘forms’ or genres (Gattungen) (p. 24 ). Just as ‘late antiquity’ already understood itself as the ‘reception of Rome’ (p. 10 ), this literature could now be said to constitute ‘the first post-Roman literature of Europe’ (p. 1 ). Christians might extend, even at times exceed, the traditional formal and stylistic repertoire. From a literary-historiographical point of view, however, the first question to be asked was always: How do their artistic initiatives respect or modify the status quo ante? ‘Literature’ itself, Herzog (like Overbeck and Curtius) assumed, was something that late antique litterati, Christian and non-Christian alike, received from the (classical) tradition. Not even the most adventurous spirits end p.54

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved of the Theodosian age were to be credited with a new ‘theory of literature’ (p. 18 ; but see above, pp. 44–7 , on Jerome and Augustine). ‘We are all German Romantics,’ a French essayist quipped not long ago (Darras 2002). European literary-historical research on later ancient, especially Latin, Christian texts during the second half of the twentieth century reveals one way in which some (of us) have been. By continuing to treat ‘literature’—in the post-Romantic sense—as if it were an invariant, trans-historical category at least as old as Homer and presumably common to all human cultures, such scholarship automatically precludes the diagnosis of historic shifts in the construction and differentiation of the ‘literary’, including any diagnosis that would attribute

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long-term significance to specifically (early) Christian developments. Classicists are now increasingly sensitive to the problematic status of ‘literature’ as a quasitranscendent concept (e.g. Goldhill 1999), even if far from unanimous in their responses to the difficulties thereby created for would-be historians of ancient Greek or Latin ‘literature’. By accident of birth, the new ‘early Christian studies’ may be less burdened from the start by the legacy of European Romanticism.

2.3.3 The End of European Literary History and the Advent of Early Christian Studies HLL is still a work in progress. Like all handbooks, it is also already a thing of the past. Its late antique volumes, envisaged from the outset as the collegial enterprise of German and French scholars, conclude a process of post-War cultural reconstruction begun by Marrou, Curtius, and their contemporaries. Herzog's prolegomena to ‘the first post-Roman literature of Europe’ could be read in the early 1990s against the background of German and European reunification. Reconsidered from the other side of 2000, a fortiori from the other side of the Atlantic, they now savour distinctly of Old Europe. Such differences of time and place cannot be sidestepped. The likelihood that the best accredited recent ‘literary methodology’ for the study of early Christian texts will seem alien to the concerns of many readers of the present chapter is a sign of important disciplinary non- and realignments. As Elizabeth Clark reminds us (above, p. 15 ), the ‘early Christian studies’ of this handbook have their institutional origins in the North American academy of the closing decades of the last century. The abbreviated disciplinary history has ‘early Christian studies’ supplanting ‘patristics’, assisted by the rise of ‘late antiquity’. While similar plots could be adduced for other parts of the world, the North American context is peculiar. First of all, the science of late antiquity in North America has remained largely untouched by the philological, literary-historical tradition of Continental European scholarship since Marrou. Its models have instead been primarily social- and religious-historical, the work of Peter Brown exerting a decisive influence. It was Brown, following Marrou in his own fashion, who in end p.55

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved the 1970s made the idea of ‘late antiquity’ current in anglophone scholarship. He did so as a self-professed historian of religion and society, and in the absence of any concerted attempt by either British or North American classicists to resituate the study of (later) early Christian texts within an expanded classical philology. The success of Brown's work has generalized the disciplinary orientation. Despite some distinguished exceptions, Anglo-American late antiquity has for the most part been resolutely un textual. With such a godparent, ‘early Christian studies’ was never likely to have any distinctive literary methodology of its own. A second factor in the formation of North American early Christian studies is its special relation (or non-relation) to what was once known as ‘literary theory’. As Clark has also pointed out, patristic studies in North America and elsewhere were bound by their own disciplinarity not to respond to the provocation of post-structuralist theories of textuality and discursivity when these were initially disseminated, between the late 1960s and early 1980s (Clark 2004). Without exception, the French thinkers commonly saluted as masters of post-structuralism (e.g. Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault) elaborated their doctrines of text and discourse in conscious relation or reaction to the most loaded terms of Christian theology and hermeneutics: logos, writing (écriture, scripture), letter/spirit, literal/allegorical, text/book, canon, tradition,

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author(ity), etc. As American critics fastened on the work of such writers and fashioned the curricular literary theory of the later 1970s and 1980s, their titles played the same gamut: Saving the Text, Allegories of Reading, and so on. Biblical scholars could not ignore the challenge presented by this quasi-religious turn in literary theorizing. Unless their subject was early Christian hermeneutics, however, patristic scholars could and for the most part did. Largely indifferent to the new European literary historiography of late antiquity, early Christian studies likewise began life largely innocent of literary theory. If these were deficiencies, they virtually cancelled each other. Having no stake in over-long histories of (western) literature, early Christian studies had little immediately to gain or lose from literary theory as such. Post-structuralism, after all, was supposed to be an awakening from the structuralist dream of a total ‘theory of literature’. When Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault—following Maurice Blanchot—dissented from ‘theological’' ways of understanding texts, their nearest reference was not usually the Bible, the fathers, or the Church, but a sacralized institution of ‘literature’. The post-structuralist doctrine of endlessly fertile, writerly textuality tilted against the restrictive practices of a scholasticprofessional exegesis of the canon(s) of ‘literature’ consecrated by European Romanticism and its heirs. This was the anti-canonical impulse that would prove so productively disruptive in North America in the 1980s and early 1990s, to the point of inspiring elegies for the ‘Western canon’' and laments for the ‘death of literature’. Alarmist as such reactions were, they did not wholly misrepresent the tenor of the times. The charge that adepts of literary theory no longer cared for literature, or that they had given up on end p.56

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved traditional literary history, contained important elements of truth. The academic disciplinarity of ‘literature’ in the modern sense had been undermined for ever. By the late 1980s, as anti-theories of literature gave way to post-poststructuralist theories of culture, Curtius's classic definition of literature as ‘the great intellectual and spiritual tradition of western culture as given form in language’ assumed a new kind of anthropological interest. The question was no longer ‘What is literature?’, but ‘What sort of a culture was it that produced and named that thing (once) called literature?’ From the perspective of ‘literary theory’, then, the timeliness of the latest early Christian studies will have had much to do with their belatedness. As this new (un)discipline disaffiliated itself from long-standing genres of ecclesiastical, patristic, theological ‘literary history’', so by right of its late coming it assumed a licence to play upon ancient texts unhampered by any modern law of ‘literature’. The results of these freedoms can be seen in the recent profusion of meticulously text-based studies that configure their early Christian, late antique subjects in terms that not only exclude the name of ‘literature’' but also frequently occlude the graphic literality of their texts—terms such as ‘rhetoric’, ‘representation’, ‘figuration’, ‘imagination’, ‘visuality’, ‘performance’, ‘memory’. None of these choices of alternative register bespeaks a methodology specific to early Christian studies. All are equally characteristic of current research in other areas of the humanities and social sciences. To the extent that work on late ancient Christianity follows models validated by scholarship in more ostensibly ‘literary’ disciplines or academic departments, it may be said to participate in the disavowal of ‘literature’ that has ensued upon the mainstreaming of ‘theory’ in those milieux. If there is any common literary methodology in the humanities nowadays, it is that of cultural studies that take all cultures to be nearly readable (like texts) but ultimately irreducible to the sum of their written resources. Yet the vocation of early Christian studies to the analysis and history of

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culture(s) has not come at the price of total renunciation of the sensus lit(t)eralis. The more or less strategic effacement of the letter that we find in much current work in the field is elsewhere matched by a sustained focus on the material dimensions of texts and on the physical, technological, and sociological contexts of their realization. Patterns and regimes of literacy; the forms, techniques, and personnel of book production, distribution, and collection; the functioning of textual, scriptural, or interpretative communities; textuality and intertextuality; modes and methods of reading; constructions of authorship—all these topics are now in the foreground of research, along with a range of others once left to the more tender care of palaeographers and codicologists. This reorientation, too, can be seen as part of a general trend in humanistic scholarship of the last two decades or so, epitomized by the ascendancy of an interdisciplinary ‘book history’. In early Christian studies, as in other domains, the displacement of the literal—even more so of the ‘literary’—has assisted, not precluded, a fresh emphasis on the materiality of letters in related end p.57

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved contexts. The paradox is only apparent. For what these seemingly contradictory gestures alike resist, or so we may infer, is the naturalization of (certain kinds of) writing as the primary vehicle and expression of (high) culture or civilization: a principle that informed the western ideology of letters from the moment of its creation by Hellenized and Hellenizing Romans, that was selectively reinforced and extended by the ‘scriptural’ initiatives of late ancient Latin Christianity, and fatefully reasserted, albeit with further crucial differences and limitations by the prophets of ‘literature’ in post-Enlightenment Europe. While granting the solidarity of early Christian studies with other kinds of contemporary academic research, we should not underestimate their originality—or advantage. Coming at the end, and from the transatlantic edge, of European literary history, they are blessed with a distance from their subject matter that other modern (un)disciplines of the ‘literary’ have had to win by laborious, even deconstructive, means.

2.4 After Literature: Rehistoricizing Early Christian Writing What, then, have early Christian studies still to do with early Christian ‘letters’' as such? Without meaning to present anything like a programme, the previous paragraphs have hinted at a reply to that question that would also begin to answer Averil Cameron's summons to students of late antique texts to ‘move [their] subject on from literary history to the history of culture’ (Cameron 1998: 707). Here it is necessary to specify: the history of a culture. For, as we have seen, to speak of ‘literary history’ or ‘literary methodology’ is already (or still) to think occidentally. From Cicero and Varro to Jerome and Augustine, to Erasmus and the post-Reformation inventors of patristics, to the Romantic reinventors of literature and its Modernist proselytizers, to the 1960s French theorists and their anglophone disciples, the discourse of universal literary value has been at base a Latin-Roman, hence western, one. The implications of this fact are only just beginning to be considered. A few years ago, in a lecture much concerned with the recent history of Europe, Jacques Derrida suggested that E. R. Curtius, along with many others before and after him, had been mistaken in treating Homer as the founding hero of European literature. In ancient Greece, Derrida pointed out, there was as yet ‘no project, no social institution, no right, no concept, nor even a word corresponding

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to what we call, stricto sensu, literature’ (likewise Goldhill 1999: 67–8). Literature was, and end p.58

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved would forever remain, a Latinism. To speak of ‘literature’, in any language, was to seek to make oneself understood ‘in the constraining hospitality or the violent reception of a latinity’. Roman and post-Roman history dictated, moreover, that this reception would in some vital sense also always be indebted to Christianity. ‘[T]o take account of the latinity of the modern institution of literature’, Derrida argued, would be ‘to take account of Christendom.’ The impossible question ‘What is literature?’ then became a ‘question of the literality of literarity, insofar as the latter is close in its destiny to the European heritage of Christian Rome’ (Derrida 2000: 22–5). This new and hardly less difficult ‘question of literature’ was broached by Derrida in his lecture and left open. Elsewhere he elaborated it in terms of all that literature could be supposed to owe to Abrahamic religion, highlighting its right ‘to say anything and conceal anything’ like the God of Abraham—or, we might add, the God of the Christian scriptures theorized by Augustine. ‘For who will deny’, Derrida asked, ‘that literature remains one of the remains of religion (reste un reste de religion), a link to and substitute for sacrosanctity in a society without God?’.9 Familiar as that premiss may be, it acquires new potential from Derrida's deeply pondered—if at best historically impressionistic—reflections on European cultural institutions and the fortunes of Abrahamic monotheism. His reopening of the vexed question of literature suggests a particular question for us to close on. What if, as well as appearing before literature, the ‘project’ of Christian writing in Latin late antiquity could be shown to be constitutive of what literature became —and hence of what it remains to this day, in its global attributions? Notes 1.

Buddeus (1727: 535): ‘Per theologiam patristicam intelligimus complexum dogmatum sacrorum ex mente sententiaque patrum, inde ut cognoscatur, quo pacto veritas religionis christianae conservata semper sit in ecclesia ac propagata’ (‘By means of patristic theology we understand the ensemble of sacred dogmas according to the mind and opinion of the fathers, and thereby know how the truth of the Christian religion has at all times been preserved and disseminated in the church’). The attempt to distinguish ‘patristics’ (derived from theologia patristica) as a branch of theology from ‘patrology’ (formerly patrologia: Gerhard 1653) as a non-theological, philological, or literary-historical discipline can be traced to the nineteenth-century Protestant theologian F. Nitzsch, who cites this passage of Buddeus (Nitzsch 1865: 41). See further Quasten (1950–60: i. 1–22); Tetz (1967); Siniscalco (1980); Merkt (2001: 240–3); above, pp. 49–50. 2. See e.g. Suetonius, De grammaticis, 4. 1: ‘litteratos... vulgo appellari... eos qui aliquid diligenter et acute scienterque possint aut dicere aut scribere’ (‘the title of litteratus is commonly applied to those who can speak or write carefully, pointedly, and knowledgeably’), with Kaster's commentary ad loc. and, more generally, Morgan (1998). 3. Thesaurus linguae latinae, s.v. ‘litteratura’, sense 2b: the examples are mainly post-classical. The more restricted sense 2a (‘grammar’, translating Gk. grammatik ) is end p.59

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© Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved attested by Augustine among others, but seems already to have been obsolete by his time: Bower (1961); Burton (2005: 147–8). 4. This way of putting it already takes for granted a long process of canon Holmes, Ch. 20 below. formation, on which see M. Augustine, Doct. chr., pref. 1: ‘ut non solum legendo alios, qui divinarum litterarum operta aperuerunt, sed etiam ipsi aperiendo proficiant’. Cf. ibid. 1. 1. 1: those who minister from their own scriptural understanding, however limited, will receive more in return–-with a reference to the miracle of the loaves and fishes. 6. Courcelle's predilection for the ‘letter’ of ancient texts would also manifest itself in pathbreaking research on the survival of Greek culture in the later Latin West (Courcelle 1943) and a revolutionary approach to Augustine's Confessions (Courcelle 1950). Bibliography in Courcelle (1984). 7. Methodological statements: Fontaine (1982, 1984b). Institutional-disciplinary retrospect: Fontaine (1984a). 8. The case is even clearer for the volume of essays on late antique ‘literature’ edited by Engels and Hofmann (1997) as of one 25 vols. comprising the Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft. 9. Derrida (1999: 205–9), partially summarized by him in Caputo and Scanlon (2005: 208): ‘[I]t is as if the question of literature, modern literature... asks for forgiveness for having forgotten or betrayed the Christian origin of literature, of writing.’ 5.

Suggested Reading

CAMERON, Alan (2004), ‘Poetry and Literary Culture in Late Antiquity’, in S. Swain and M. Edwards (eds.), Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 327–54. CAMERON, Averil (1991), Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press).

—— (1998), ‘Education and Literary Culture’, in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey (eds.), The Cambridge Ancient History, xiii: The Late Roman Empire, A.D. 337–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 665–707. CAVALLO, G., and CHARTIER, R. (1999) (eds.), A History of Reading in the West, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity). CLARK, E. A. (2004), History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). DAWSON, J. D. (2002), Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press). DIHLE, A. (1994), Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire, trans. M. Malzahn (London: Routledge). FONTAINE, J. (1981), Naissance de la poésie dans l'Occident chrétien: Esquisse d'une histoire de la poésie latine chrétienne du III e au VI e siècle (Paris: L'Institut d'études augustiniennes).

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GAMBLE, H. Y. (1995), Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press). HARRIS, W. V. (1989), Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). end p.60

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved KASTER, R. A. (1988), Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press). KLINGSHIRN, W. E., and SAFRAN, L. (2007) (eds.), The Early Christian Book (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press). MORESCHINI, C., and NORELLI, E. (2005) (eds.), Early Christian Greek and Latin Literature: A Literary History, trans. M. J. O'Connell (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers). YOUNG, F. M. (1997), Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— AYRES, L., and LOUTH, A. (2004) (eds.), The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Bibliography Primary sources

AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS , Res gestae, ed. and trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935–40). AUGUSTINE , De doctrina christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. GREEN (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). —— Epistulae, ed. A. GOLDBACHER , CSEL 34. 1–2, 44, 57, 58 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1895–1923); trans. J. C. Cunningham, NPNF1, 219–593. BASIL OF CAESAREA , Ad adolescentes, in N. G. WILSON (ed.), Saint Basil on the Value of Greek Literature (London: Duckworth, 1975); trans. R. J. Deferrari, St. Basil: Letters, LCL (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), iv. 249–348. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA , Stromateis 1–6, ed. O. Stählin, GCS 15 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1939); trans. W. Wilson, ANF 2 (1885), 299–567.

JEROME , De viris illustribus, ed. E. C. RICHARDSON , TU 14. 1 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1896); trans. T. P. Halton, On Illustrious Men, FC 100 (Washington D.C.: Catholic

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University of America Press, 1999). —— Epistulae, ed. I. Hilberg, CSEL 54–6 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1910–18); trans. W. H. Fremantle, NPNF2 6 (1892), 1–295. SUETONIUS , De grammaticis et rhetoribus, ed. and trans. R. A. KASTER (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, ed. R. Demeulenaere, CCSL 64 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985), 125–231; trans. C. A. Heurtley, NPNF2 11 (1884), 123–59.

Secondary sources

AUERBACH, E. (1953), Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press; original German edn. 1946). —— (1965), Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. R. Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

BACKUS, I. (2003), Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden: E. J. Brill). BANNIARD, M. (1992), Viva Voce: Communication écrite et communication orale du IV e au IX e siècle en Occident latin (Paris: L'Institut d'études augustiniennes).

end p.61

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved BÉNÉ, C. (1969), Érasme et saint Augustin ou influence de saint Augustin sur l'humanisme d'Érasme (Geneva: Droz). BERTRAND, D. (2002), ‘Der Aufschwung der Patristik in Frankreich in der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts (1942–1958)’, in H. Duchhardt and G. May (eds.), Geschichtswissenschaft um 1950 (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern), 112–26. BLOCH, R. Howard (1994), God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbé Migne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). BLUM, R. (1983), ‘Die Literaturverzeichnung im Altertum und Mittelalter’, Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 24: 1–256. BOWER, E. W. (1961), ‘Some Technical Terms in Roman Education’, Hermes, 89: 462–77.

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BOWERSOCK, G. W. (1990), Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). BROWN, P. (1997), ‘The World of Late Antiquity Revisited’, SO 72: 5–30.

BUDDEUS, J. F. (1727), Isagoge historico-theologia ad theologiam universam (Leipzig: T. Fritschius). BURTON, P. (2005), ‘The Vocabulary of the Liberal Arts in Augustine's Confessions’, in Pollmann and Vessey (2005), 141–64. CAMERON, A[veril] (1998), ‘Education and Literary Culture’, in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey (eds.), The Cambridge Ancient History, xiii: The Late Roman Empire, A.D. 337–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 665–707.

CAPUTO, J. D., and SCANLON, M. J. (2005) (eds.), Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press).

CARLYLE, T. (1841), On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (London: Chapman and Hall). CAVE, W. (1688–98), Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum historia literaria (London: R. Chiswell). CHATEAUBRIAND, F.-R. de (1802), Le génie du christianisme ou beautés de la religion chrétienne (Paris: Migneret). CLARK, E. A. (2004), History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). COURCELLE, P. (1943), Les lettres grecques en Occident, de Macrobe à Cassiodore (Paris: Éditions de Boccard; 2nd edn. 1948); trans. H. E. Wedeck as Late Latin Writers and their Greek Sources (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969). —— (1948), Histoire littéraire des grandes invasions germaniques (Paris: Hachette; 3rd edn. Paris: L'Institut d'études augustiniennes, 1964).

—— (1950), Recherches sur les ‘Confessions’ de saint Augustin (Paris: E. de Boccard; 2nd edn. 1968). —— (1984), Opuscula selecta: Bibliographie et recueil d'articles publiés entre 1938 et 1980 (Paris: L'Institut d'études augustiniennes). CRISTIN, C. (1973), Aux origines de l'histoire littéraire (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble).

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CURTIUS, E. R. (1953), European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press; original German edn. 1948). DANIÉLOU, J. (1950), Sacramentum futuri: Études sur les origines de la typologie biblique (Paris: Beauchesne); trans. as From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers (London: Burns & Oates, 1960). —— MARROU, H. (1963), Nouvelle Histoire de l'Eglise, ed. L.-J. Roger et al., ii: Des origines à saint Grégoire le Grand (Paris: Seuil). end p.62

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved DARRAS, J. (2002), Nous sommes tous des romantiques allemands: De Dante à Whitman en passant par Iéna (Paris: Calmann-Lévy). DE GHELLINCK, J. (1947), Patristique et Moyen Âge: Études d'histoire littéraire et doctrinale, ii: Introduction et compléments à l'étude de la patristique (Gembloux:

J. Duculot). DERRIDA, J. (1999), Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée). —— (2000), Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. E. Rottenberg (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press; original French edn. 1998). EDEN, K. (1997), Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press).

ENGELS, L. J., and HOFMANN, H. (1997) (eds.), Spätantike, Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft, 4 (Wiesbaden: AULA Verlag). ENGLISH, E. D. (1995) (ed.), Reading and Wisdom: The De doctrina christiana of Augustine in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press). ERASMUS, D. (1978), Antibarbari [‘The Antibarbarians]/Parabolae, trans. C. R. Thompson, CWE 23 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). ESCARPIT, R. (1958), ‘Définitions de l'histoire et de la littérature’, in R. Queneau (ed.), Histoire des littératures, iii: Littératures françaises, connexes et marginales (Paris: Gallimard), 1737–1811. FONTAINE, J. (1970), La littérature latine chrétienne (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). —— (1982), ‘Christentum ist auch Antike: Einige Überlegungen zu Bildung und

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Literatur in der lateinischen Spätantike’, JAC 25: 5–21. —— (1984a) ‘Les laïcs et les études patristique latines dans l'Université française au XXe Siècle’, RBén 94: 444–61. —— (1984b), ‘Postclassicisme, Antiquité tardive, latin des chrétiens: L'évolution de la problématique d'une histoire de la littérature romaine du IIIe au VIe siècle depuis Schanz’, Bulletin de l'Association Guillaume Budé, 1984/2: 195–212.

GERHARD, J. (1653), Patrologia sive de primitivae ecclesiae christianae doctorum vita ac lucubrationibus opusculum (Iena: G. Sengenwaldius). GOLDHILL, S. (1999), ‘Literary History without Literature’, SubStance, 88: 57–89.

GORMAN, M. (1985), ‘The Diffusion of the Manuscripts of St Augustine's De doctrina christiana in the Early Middle Ages’, RBén 95: 11–24. HAGENDAHL, H. (1983), Von Tertullian zu Cassiodor: Die profane literarische Tradition in dem lateinischen christlichen Schrifttum, Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia (Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis). HARNACK, A. (1968), Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius, 2 vols. in 4 parts (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik; originally published, Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1893–1904). HERZOG, R. (2002), Spätantike: Studien zur römischen und lateinisch-christlichen Literatur, ed. P. Habermehl, Hypomnemata: Untersuchungen zur Antike und zu ihrem Nachleben, Supplement-Reihe Bd. 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). —— (1989) (ed.), Restauration und Erneuerung: die lateinische Literatur von 284 bis 374 n. Chr, Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike, 5 (Munich: C. H. Beck). HUYSMANS, J. K. (2003), À Rebours; trans. R. Baldick as Against Nature (London: Penguin) from Œuvres complètes, vii (Paris: Crès, 1929; original French publication, Paris: G. Charpentier, 1884). JORDAN, H. (1911), Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer). end p.63

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved MADOZ, J. (1933), El concepto de la tradición en S. Vicente de Lerins, Analecta Gregoriana, 5 (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana).

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MCKITTERICK, R. (1989), The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— (2004), History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). MARKUS, R. A. (1990), The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— (1996), Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). —— (forthcoming), ‘Between Marrou and Brown: Transformations of Late Antique Christianity’, in P. Rousseau and M. Papoutsakis (eds.), Transformations of Late Antiquity: Essays for Peter Brown (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate). MARROU, H.-I. (1938), Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris: E. de Boccard; reissued with a ‘Retractatio’, 1949). —— (1948), Histoire de l'éducation dans l'antiquité (Paris: Seuil); trans. G. Lamb as A History of Education in Antiquity (London: Sheed and Ward, 1956).

—— (1949), ‘Retractatio’ appended to reissue of Marrou 1938 (with continuous pagination). MERKT, A. (2001), Das patristische Prinzip: Eine Studie zur theologische Bedeutung der Kirchenväter (Leiden: E. J. Brill). MÖHLER, J. A. (1840), Patrologie oder christliche literärgeschichte (Regensburg: G. J. Manz). MORGAN, T. (1998), Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). NITZSCH, F. (1865), ‘Geschichtliches und Methodologisches zur Patristik’, JDT 10: 37–63. OCKER, C. (2002), Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). O'DALY , G. J. P. (1999), Augustine's ‘City of God’: A Reader's Guide (Oxford: Clarendon Press). OVERBECK, F. (1882), ‘Über die Anfänge der patristischen Literatur’, Historische Zeitschrift,

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POLLMANN, K. (1996), Doctrina Christiana: Untersuchungen zu den Anfängen der christlichen Hermeneutik unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Augustinus, De doctrina christiana, Par. 41 (Freiburg, Schweiz: Universitätsverlag Freiburg).

—— (2005), ‘Augustine's Hermeneutics as a Universal Discipline!?’, in Pollmann and Vessey (2005), 206–31. —— VESSEY , M. (2005) (eds.), Augustine and the Disciplines: Cassiciacum to ‘Confessions’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press). QUASTEN, J. (1950–60), Patrology, 3 vols. (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press; Utrecht: Spectrum). QUINN, K. (1979), Texts and Contexts: The Roman Writers and their Audience (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). RAWSON, E. (1985), Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (London: Duckworth). RICE, E. F. jun. (1983), Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). SARTRE, J.-P. (1948), Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard); trans. B. Frechtman as What is Literature? (London: Methuen, 1950). end p.64

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved SCHADEWALDT, W. (1973), ‘Der Umfang des Begriffs der Literatur in der Antike’, in H. Rüdiger (ed.), Literature und Dichtung: Versuch einer Begriffsbestimmung (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer), 12–25. SCHÄUBLIN, C. (1995), ‘De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture?’, in D. W. H. Arnold and P. Bright (eds.), De Doctrina Christiana: A Classic of Western Culture (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press), 47–67.

SHANZER, D. (2005), ‘Augustine's Disciplines: Silent diutius Musae Varronis?’, in Pollmann and Vessey (2005), 69–112. SIEBEN, H. J. (1979), Die Konzilsidee der Alten Kirche (Paderborn: F. Schöningh).

SINISCALCO, P. (1980), ‘Patristica, patrologia e letteratura cristiana antica ieri e oggi: Postille storiche e metodologiche’, Aug 20: 383–400. TETZ, M. (1967), ‘Altchristliche Literaturgeschichte—Patrologie’, TRu 32: 1–42.

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VESSEY , M. (1998), ‘The Demise of the Christian Writer and the Remaking of “Late Antiquity”: From H.-I. Marrou's Saint Augustine (1938) to Peter Brown's Holy Man (1983)’, JECS 6: 377–411; repr. in idem., Latin Christian Writers in Late Antiquity and their Texts (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2005, item XI) —— (2004), ‘Introduction’, in Cassiodorus: ‘Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning’ and ‘On the Soul’, trans. J. W. Halporn, Translated Texts for Historians, 42 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), 1–101. WAWRYKOW , J. (1995), ‘Reflections on the Place of the De doctrina christiana in High Scholastic Discussions of Theology’, in English (1995), 99–125. WIDDOWSON, P. (1999), Literature (London: Routledge). WILLIAMS, R. (1976), Keywords (London: Croom Helm). WILSON, N. G. (1992), From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). YOUNG, F. (1994), ‘Typology’, in S. E. Porter, P. Joyce, and D. E. Orton (eds.), Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 29–48. —— (1997), Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). end p.65

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [66]-[84]

3 Which Early Christianity? Karen L. King Abstract: Historical Criticism – Identities – Jewish Christianity – New Contexts/New Questions Keywords: Christ, Christianity, Christian ‘F OR it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there is quarrelling among you, my brethren. What I mean is that each one of you says, “I belong to Paul”, or “I belong to Apollos”, or “I belong to Cephas”, or “I belong to Christ”.’ Thus begins one of the very earliest surviving documents of Christianity, Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (1: 11–12). It would seem that the questions ‘Which Christianity? Whose Christianity?’ were posed very early, even before the gospels and most of the New Testament literature had been composed, and at a time when the number of believers must have been very small indeed. Throughout the history of Christianity, diverse beliefs and practices would ebb and flow on the tides of historical change and conflict, navigating and sometimes floundering with ever-shifting geographical, social-political, and cultural contexts as Christianity expanded from a tiny movement to a global religion. The issues, actors, and contexts would vary, but diversity would continue to characterize Christianity, even in the face of powerful claims to unity and uniformity. The question is how to represent this ever-shifting diversity adequately. This problem has become increasingly urgent owing to several factors, prominent among them the rise of critical historical methodologies and new frameworks for the study of early Christianity; astonishing discoveries of previously unknown ancient texts from Egypt; and questions arising from new contexts, especially from ecumenism and the realities of local and global pluralisms. end p.66

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3.1 Historical Criticism Given that Christianity has never been a unified or uniform phenomenon, how has the problem of diversity been discussed? In ancient Christianity, it was generally posed in terms of unity and division. By the fourth century, Christian discussions of variety and difference settled into the tidy, bifurcating mode of orthodoxy and heresy, right and wrong, true and false. The master narrative of Christian origins and development claimed that the true path of orthodoxy inaugurated by Jesus had been passed on to twelve male apostles (plus Paul) and their successors, the bishops of the one true Church. Satan had later corrupted this original truth by the introduction of divisive heresy (Bauer 1971: pp. xxi–xxv; Le Boulluec 1985). The defenders of the true Church promulgated powerful rhetorical claims to the unity and harmony of the Church, combined with derisive denunciations of the heretics' factionalism. The heretics, they

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claimed, had contaminated the true faith by importing Greek philosophy or had fallen back into the clutches of an unredeemed religion of Jewish legalism. They deviated from the doctrinal prescriptions of the creed and the practices of the true Church, lacked true morality, were incapable of properly interpreting scripture, and were disobedient to the proper authority of the established leadership. This rhetorical discourse of orthodoxy and heresy has proved extremely powerful and persistent throughout the history of Christianity (King 2003b: 20–54). Close examination by modern historians, however, has found much to criticize in this tidy portrait of the causes and character of early Christian diversity. In particular, the rise of historical criticism in New Testament scholarship introduced methodological principles that exposed fundamental disparities already in the supposed harmony of the earliest Christians. These historians assumed that the ancient authors all wrote with particular purposes in mind and directed their works at specific audiences. It followed, then, that the particular historical circumstances and theological tendencies of each work had to be elucidated in the context of the work's original composition within the broader framework of early Christian history. Prior to this time, scripture had been understood to express the single, unchanging voice of God; apparent differences were harmonized through reading practices that emphasized their conformity to established creed and doctrine. In this approach, differences were minimalized, while similarities were emphasized or even manufactured, often with great intellectual effort and ingenuity. But with the rise of historical criticism, the age-old practice of interpreting scripture as a unitary whole was discredited. With the ban on harmonization, theological and historical differences among the canonical texts began to appear quite forcefully. Historical criticism has produced at least three durable (if not entirely unproblematic) effects. One effect was to categorize the earliest forms of Christianity into end p.67

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved four basic types, each with subtypes or variants located along their spectra: Jewish Christianity, Gentile Christianity, Apocalyptic Christianity, and early Catholicism. Second, exposing authors' tendentious interests slowly worked to relativize the seemingly impartial historical value of the canonical books. History was no longer understood as the ground upon which Satan futilely opposed the inexorable, teleological movement of God's will; it became a place of human struggle, conflict, and constructive negotiation. Third, using the idea of authorial intentionality to ground a monological reading of each particular text or corpus of texts produced a set of homogeneous, self-enclosed types of Christianity, each increasingly identified with a well-bounded community. Eventually there would be studies of Matthew's or John's community, Pauline churches, Thomas Christianity, and the like. Variety came to dwell within the New Testament canon itself and spilled out beyond its edges. The historical-critical approach is exemplified in the work of Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), who set out a number of fundamental oppositions that would reorient the writing of early (Christian history 1878, 1879). Chief among them were the contrast between Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God and the Pauline kerygma of the crucified and exalted Christ; a sharp distinction between the theology of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and the Gospel of John; and conflict between the Gentile (Hellenistic) Christianity of Paul and the Jewish Christianity of Peter and the Jerusalem church. In Baur's view, later works, like the Acts of the Apostles and the Pastoral Epistles, needed to be read as attempts to unify the church by reconciling the disagreements between Jewish

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Christians and Hellenizers. Theologically, he argued that Paul's view of Christ was central to early Christian development because it provided a bridge between the human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels and the pre-existent Logos of the Johannine Gospel (Baur 1878: 44–183; 1879: 65–72). The catholic (universal) Church developed its dogma and hierarchical institutions as the antithesis to Gnosticism and Montanism (1879: 1–61). Later historians would nuance this picture considerably, insisting that rather than developing along a linear model of Hegelian dialectic as Baur had proposed (of thesis, antithesis, synthesis), conflicting forms of Christianity existed simultaneously. Historians also multiplied the types of early Christianities in conflict, most importantly adding Apocalyptic Christianity as a basic type (now distinct from Jewish Christianity). At the turn of the twentieth century, scholars such as Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer emphasized the apocalyptic theology of Jesus and earliest Christianity, setting it in direct contrast to later forms of catholic Christianity (represented by Acts and the Pastoral Epistles) that were now considered to have been formed at least in part by ‘the delay of the parousia’ (Weiss 1985; Schweitzer 1954). Historians also increasingly linked doctrinal conflict with the historical development of different forms of social life. Describing the audiences addressed by the New Testament texts, as well as the groups out of which they arose, would come end p.68

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved to be a central task of early Christian historiography. Texts were read as reflections of the historical situations of the communities that produced them. Theological differences in the texts frequently (and problematically) came to be read as ciphers for communities in conflict (e.g. Riley 1995; critique by Dunderberg 1997). Another watershed in the representation of early Christian diversity came in 1932 with the publication of Walter Bauer's monograph Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei in ältesten Christentum (Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity). Although Bauer kept the categories of orthodoxy and heresy intact, he argued that the earliest forms of Christianity were not always or everywhere ‘orthodox’. Rather, Christianity initially developed different forms in different geographical areas, some of which were ‘heretical’ from the beginning. This position fundamentally challenged the supposition that the origin of Christianity was characterized by a ‘pure orthodoxy’ untainted by ‘heresy’. Although scholars have challenged various aspects of Bauer's thesis, it was to have a decisive effect on subsequent representations of early Christian diversity (King 2003b: 110–15). James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, for example, were building on Bauer's work when they proposed a model of development in terms of ‘trajectories’. The term ‘trajectory’ was meant to capture the dynamics of historical movement through the Hellenistic world, rather than delineate a unique essence against its supposedly static ‘background’ (1971: 14–15). Trajectories would chart directionality and flow, rejecting the anachronistic distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy that Bauer had presupposed in favour of a theological approach tied to literary forms (1971: 186; critique by Janßen 1999). With varying success, others sought to establish the histories of particular streams of tradition under the names of particular apostles, notably Pauline, Johannine, and Thomas Christianities. The soundest developments of Bauer's work, however, have stemmed from his notion that the history of Christianity has to be written regionally. Koester, for example, organized much of his eminent History and Literature of Early Christianity by geographical regions (1982). Other studies have been undertaken of particular locales; an outstanding recent example is Peter Lampe's study of the diversity of Christianity at Rome (2003). Such studies have largely avoided creating homogeneous types of Christianity in each locale,

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but rather have demonstrated that even while Christianity developed differently in particular regions, each region also has its own complex story of early Christian diversity. By stressing the diversity of early Christianity, such approaches simultaneously raised the urgent theological question of whether any discernible unity lay beneath all this division, and how to characterize it. In what sense may we speak of all this variety as Christianity? One kind of solution is exemplified by Adolph von Harnack, who located the essence of Christianity in a trans-historical religion characterized by inwardness and enthusiasm, expressed in the gospel teachings of Jesus. This essence was preserved intact despite changing historical dress or development. Indeed, he argued, it is precisely because the Gospel is not tied to any particular end p.69

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved form of expression that it continues to signify (1957: esp. 54–6, 62–8, 149; King 2003b: 55–70). Some, however, found this ahistorical essentializing unsatisfying and turned to a more thematic theological approach. A good example is found in James Dunn's monograph Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (1977). He agreed with Bauer that no foundational orthodoxy lay at the origin of Christianity; nonetheless, he argued that all the New Testament books provide evidence of a common theological core—the unity between the earthly (crucified) Jesus and the exalted Christ. Although he recognized that this thematic formulation is an abstraction that is nowhere to be found as such in the texts themselves, he insisted that each text offers an expression of this common kerygma or confessional formula appropriate to its own particular situation, despite the real differences and disagreements that resulted (1977: 30–1, 56–8). The lesson he drew is that the validity of the New Testament lies in its continuing ability to bear ‘consistent testimony to the unifying centre’ and simultaneously to recognize ‘the validity of diversity’, a view specifically crafted in the context of contemporary ecumenism (1977: 376–7).1 He goes on to suggest that this common core also defined the limits of acceptable diversity, marking off true expressions of the proto-orthodox faith in Jewish Christianity, Hellenistic Christianity, Apocalypticism, and early Catholicism from their excesses in Ebionism, Gnosticism, Montanism, and (with less emphasis) later Catholicism (1977: 262–6, 306–8, 336–40, 376). Although other theologians have defined the content of this core in other ways, the tendency has been to characterize variety within early Christianity as being of a single sort with a unitary core, increasingly referred to as ‘proto-orthodoxy’ (for example, Ehrman 2003). In this way, variety is presented as in some sense merely different versions of the same thing. Moreover, although this nomenclature implicitly acknowledges that ‘orthodoxy’ is a term of hindsight when applied to the earliest materials, the term ‘proto-orthodoxy’ functions to establish continuity with true orthodoxy defined by canon and creed. In contrast, other types of early Christianity are generally characterized in terms of their marginality or deviance from established norms, and are generally not referred to by a single term but by distinctive nomenclature, such as Montanism, Ebionism, and Gnosticism, or even ‘lost Christianities’. The effect is to emphasize sameness and continuity among the works classified as ‘proto-orthodox’, while other forms of Christianity are characterized by their differences, both from ‘the mainstream’ and from each other. So in the end, despite widespread recognition of the enormous variety of early Christianity, in practice this diversity has been resolved back into the two basic categories of the ancient master narrative: orthodoxy and heresy.

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One reason why this dual taxonomy continues to be reproduced has to do with the sources. Although the nineteenth- and twentieth-century views of early Christian diversity were formed on the basis of new historical-critical approaches, they were largely applied to well-known literature, and thus that literature end p.70

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved continued to supply not only the data but also the framework for reconstruction. As a result, despite the methodological innovations of historical criticism, the twentieth-century classification of the varieties of Christianity largely reproduced the classificatory system and rhetorical strategies of early Christian polemicists. In my opinion, we are now at the brink of another watershed in the representation of early Christian diversity. Building on the foundations established by historical criticism, numerous recent studies in New Testament and late antiquity have laid the groundwork for a reconsideration of early Christian notions of difference. These studies draw upon and contribute to work in social history, cultural anthropology, feminism, post-structuralism, and postmodern criticism, and are aided by work integrating archaeological materials, including the new textual discoveries from Qumran, Nag Hammadi, Oxyrhynchus, and elsewhere, into early Christian historiography. Owing to considerations of space, it is not possible to give an adequate account of the impact of this wide-ranging work here. Let me offer a summary of just one kind of approach: the analytical shift from essence to practice in considering early Christian ‘identities’.

3.2 Identities An adequate framework for historical descriptions of early Christian diversity needs to recognize that all religions contain ever-shifting, competing, and contradictory claims, plural possibilities, and alternative voices. ‘[B]oundedness, continuity, and homogeneity are not objective aspects of social life’ (Handler, in van der Veer 1994: 208–9), but are rhetorical terms used in constructing shared religious identity. Yet typologies of the varieties of early Christianity instead frequently constitute attempts to define and categorize the unique and essential qualities of distinct theological systems or social groups. Essentializing categories tend to reify the complex, overlapping, multifarious clusters of material that constitute the continually shifting, interactive forms of early Christian meaningmaking and social belonging into homogenous, stable, well-bounded theological or sociological formations. There are at least two problems with this kind of approach. First, the data are not so tidy, and trying to fit them neatly into such categories has distorted the evidence to the point where they can serve no useful purpose (M. A. Williams 1996; King 2003b). New texts from discoveries in the modern period have served only to confound this situation, straining the categories to the breaking point. Second, this essentializing freezes the processes of historical and theological dynamics, misleading us into thinking that any religion is a homogeneous and fixed entity with a determinate essence or decisive moment of pure origination rather than properly end p.71

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relations within and porous, overlapping boundaries with traditions without. Social groups are constantly engaged in the processes of meaning-making and social formation, using the manifold valued resources at hand to think with. To understand these processes, it is critical to shift the perspective away from understanding ‘religions as ready-made systems of meaning awaiting interpretation’, as Ortner puts it, to the view that ‘people are spinning what Geertz called “webs of meaning” all the time, with whatever cultural resources happen to be at hand’. The fundamental assumption we need to work with is that ‘people are always trying to make sense of their lives, always weaving fabrics of meaning, however fragile and fragmentary’ (Ortner 1997: 9). Viewed this way, the focus is not upon identifying the essential characteristics of various homogeneous types of Christianity, but upon analysing the variety of discourses, material and intellectual resources, processes, and practices by which people make sense of their lives in contexts of ancient pluralism, the governing regimes and institutions that further and constrain such practices, and the power relations that are at stake (King 2003b: 230–1). It is these that an adequate account of diversity would need to chart. Such analyses would necessarily contextualize the complex dynamics of social and intellectual life that are fully embedded in the ancient Mediterranean world. They would consider stability as well as change over time, and the processes that bind groups as well as what separates them. Such analyses would also be fully aware of the limits as well as the possibilities of our access to this world through our (largely textual) historical evidence. Because any contexts exposed by such writings are themselves already textualized through the rhetorical aims and methods of the literary work, they cannot be read as mirrors onto social reality, but have to be understood as rhetorical constructions (Schüssler Fiorenza 1999; Clark 2004). What, then, are the surviving texts evidence of? Do they offer proof of the existence of well-bounded and distinct groups, or is that merely the effect of essentializing methods? Given that texts are always replete with alternative meanings because they are characterized by gaps, incongruity, and polyphony, we would expect to find multiple and competing voices even within individual texts. No composition is ever an act of pure creativity, in that all texts are dialogically composed of the ‘already said’, and because cultural codes constrain, as well as enable, literary production (King 2003b: 231–3). The task is to grasp the literary practices, cultural codes, discursive structures, hermeneutical strategies, and rhetorical ends that constitute the production of particular literary works. We need to ask not only what resource materials are being drawn upon but toward what ends and for whom. Given that there are many ways to map difference, and given that any categorization of early Christian diversity will both illumine some things and distort or hide others, depending upon its aims (Smith 1982; 2004: 30–1, 208–9, 316), any resulting typologies would necessarily be positional and provisional; that is, they would be end p.72

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved understood as scholarly constructs intended to do limited kinds of carefully specified intellectual work in order to serve some particular end. Such analyses would acknowledge that our systems of classification give us information not only about the data under consideration but also about the classifiers' intellectual interests, the power relations they desire to maintain, critique, or revise, and the values they hold implicitly or explicitly. One of the most promising new approaches is the analysis of identity formation (Lieu 2004). Although the project of analysing Christianity in the framework of identity formation is broader than the question of ‘Which Early Christianity?’, its

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aims and methods lend themselves to the questions of diversity (see e.g. Lieu's discussion of the ‘varieties of Judaism’, 2004: 18–19). It aims to understand the discursive strategies and processes by which early Christians developed notions of themselves as distinct from others within the Mediterranean world (and were recognized as such by others), including the multiple ways in which Christians produced various constructions of what it meant to be Christian. Methodologically, it is oriented toward the critical analysis of practices, such as producing texts; constructing shared history through memory, selective appropriation, negotiation, and invention of tradition; developing ritual performances such as baptism and meals; writing and selectively privileging certain theological forms (e.g. creeds) and canons; forming bodies and gender; making place and marking time; assigning nomenclature and establishing categories; defining ‘others’; and so on. This approach has the advantage of considering symbolic and discursive activities as social-rhetorical practices fully embedded in social-material conditions, shaping as well as being shaped by them—especially in distinction from approaches that distinguish too sharply between ideology and material reality or that ‘ignore the material, embodied, place-making dimensions of religion’ by focusing exclusively ‘on meaning and signification in religion’ (Vasquez 2005: 224). Rather than reinscribe the discourse of orthodoxy and heresy, this framework requires analysis of the deployments and effects of this rhetoric as a discursive strategy by which borders could be constructed, patrolled, and maintained while simultaneously paying attention to the disjunctures and continuities that are constitutive of groups and that define their relations to each other and to the past. This analysis is also concerned with the mechanisms that bind groups together and that shape both local and trans-local affirmations of common identity. Identity formation does not take place in a vacuum, but groups define themselves in relation to each other, often using similar strategies. As a result, ‘there is not any universal meaning that can be attributed to terms such as “Roman”, “Greek”, “Christian”, “barbarian”, “Jew”’; nor are they ‘mutually exclusive categories, and so we can only expect to understand one term in its relations with the others’ (Lieu 2004: 21). It would, for example, be impossible to understand Christian claims to be ‘a third race’ (as well as the limits of Christian claims to universalism) apart from ancient uses of ethnic reasoning by Greeks, Romans, and Jews (Buell 2005). This perspective requires shifting our end p.73

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved notion of early Christian diversity from a catalogue of supposedly fixed, homogeneous entities to an analysis of the multifarious, fluid, and sometimes contradictory practices in which Christians engaged. A brief consideration of Jewish Christianity will begin to illustrate the possibilities in shifting the discussion of early Christian diversity from essentializing reifications to the analysis of practices.

3.3 Jewish Christianity The term ‘Jewish Christianity’ can refer to any of the following: • Christianity as a variant type of Judaism, exemplified in the fact that Jesus and his earliest followers were Jews. • Ethnic Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah. • Christians who maintained Jewish practices, such as faithful adherence to the Law, Sabbath observance, dietary practices, male circumcision, festivals, or synagogue attendance.

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• First-century members of the Jerusalem church who may have fled to Pella during the war with Rome (Acts 1: 12–8: 3; Eusebius of Caesarea, Hist. eccl. 3. 5. 3). Ebionites or Nazoreans, an alternative nomenclature for certain Jewish Christians found in second-century and later polemical literature, are sometimes understood to have derived from the Jerusalem church or from Peter's teaching, or to be a later group altogether (Jones 1997 [1990]). • The influence of Jewish concepts and texts, including acceptance of the authority of Hebrew scriptures, reliance on Jewish theology (especially apocalypticism), or the use of Jewish modes of biblical interpretation. • An adoptionist Christology (maintaining that Jesus was only a human being ‘adopted’ by God to be his Son; rejection of the virginal conception of Jesus). • A denigration of Paul in favour of Peter and/or James. • The exclusive use of Matthew's Gospel. These items refer variously to ethnicity, religious beliefs or practices, historical events, sectarian groups, and literary or hermeneutical practices, making ‘Jewish Christianity’ a particularly exasperating case of classificatory imprecision. To begin to grasp the difficulties of applying this category usefully, let us take a look at the apostle Paul. On the one hand, Paul was a Pharisaic Jew who believed in Christ; his theology was shaped by an acceptance of scriptural authority, various streams of Jewish theology, modes of biblical interpretation, messianic expectations, and much more. Does that make him a Jewish Christian? Is Pauline Christianity thus a type of Jewish Christianity? Or did Paul never think he had end p.74

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved ceased being a Jew when he accepted Jesus as the Christ, so should we talk about Pauline theology as one of the many expressions of early Judaism? Or is the issue, rather, that it is too early to draw a clear line between Christians and Jews? And what about Paul's attitude toward Gentiles? Paul argued that Gentiles who believed in Christ did not need to follow the practices of Jewish table fellowship, and Gentile males did not need to be circumcised. In that sense he has been understood as the exemplary purveyor of Gentile Christianity. So is Pauline Christianity a kind of Gentile Christianity? Is this confirmed by his apparent tensions with the leadership of the Jerusalem church and Peter—also all Jews? Or should Paul's disputes with other Jews rather lead us to speak about intra-Jewish controversy here, rather than a conflict between Jewish and Gentile types of Christianity? The problem of how to categorize Paul is yet further complicated by attempts to gain a clear picture of the churches to which Paul is writing. Far from portraying some homogeneous form of Pauline Christianity, the controversies in Paul's letters offer evidence of a variety of viewpoints among and within the churches he addressed, as well as diversity of ethnicity, gender, marital status, age, economic status, and social status, inter alia. The authorial voice of the letters offers a rhetorical representation of the inscribed author, opponents, audience, and various issues under debate from which some scholars have reconstructed a nuanced and reasonably consistent portrait of the basic contours of Pauline theology; but the dialogical character of the text continually lets us hear alternative voices as well. These voices disrupt the authorial voice's attempt to define the ‘reality’ of the situation, instead making space for alternative reconstructions of what was going on and what was at stake (see e.g. Schüssler Fiorenza 1985: 160–241; 1999: 105–28; Wire 1990; Martin 1995; Miller 2004). Plenty of ink has been spilled in trying to fix the identity of these alternative voices by figuring them as ‘Paul's opponents’ or as factions that Paul is trying to reconcile. In Corinth, for example, they have been identified as Gentile Christians, Gnostics, spiritual enthusiasts, elites, disruptive women, and

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loquacious prophets, among others. In Galatians, Paul tells us that he had directly opposed Peter in Antioch when ‘certain men came from James’ and he feared ‘the circumcision faction’ (2: 11–12). This array of potential ‘opponents’ may have something to do with the profusion and diversity of the issues under debate, such as whether the faithful should eat meat offered to idols, whether women prophets should continue to pray in the congregation unveiled, whether one should pay taxes to Caesar or circumcise Gentile men who accept Jesus Christ, and so on. Paul's ‘opponents’ themselves may not have all been of one mind on these many issues or have consistently aligned themselves against his position. They most certainly would not always have defined the issues as he did or have considered the same things to be at stake. Nor is it clear that Paul's authority was always equally accepted everywhere; indeed, the Corinthian correspondence seems to indicate that Paul was unable to persuade very many there to accept his views. Clearly the churches Paul addressed were diverse, end p.75

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved both internally and geographically, making it difficult, if not impossible, to divide either his ‘opponents’ (or his churches) neatly into examples of Gentile or Jewish Christianity. The letters of Paul do not offer a well-bounded homogeneous entity or type of Christianity, but multiformity, polyphony, and dialogical engagement with select Graeco-Roman and Jewish materials in a variety of social contexts. We hear not only Paul's pleading and exhortation, but alternative voices in dialogue and conflict with him and each other, such as competing claims about the roles of women in the Spirit-filled community and plural possibilities for defining the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. To complicate the problem of categorization further, Paul's theology is rife with apocalyptic themes and images; his letters were highly influential among so-called heretics (Gnostics) like Valentinus and Heracleon; and the early catholic Pastoral Epistles are written in his name—suggesting possible connections with Apocalyptic Christianity, Gnosticism, or early Catholicism as well as Gentile or Jewish Christianity. In the end, these categories are not particularly helpful in understanding what was going on in the Pauline churches or the reception of Paul's letters, what was at stake, and for whom. One might argue that Paul is an unusual case, but even if we turn to what might appear to be a more straightforward example of Jewish Christianity, the Ebionites, the situation is not much improved (Strecker 1971; Taylor 1990). Our information about Jewish Christian groups like the Ebionites is scant, and reconstructions have to take into account the rhetorical strategies of the polemicists who supply most of our information. It would seem that they wanted to construct clear boundaries in situations that were in fact ambiguous, given that at least some followers of Jesus continued to attend synagogue, to observe the commandments, including dietary laws and circumcision, and even to emphasize a common, non-supersessionist heritage well into the third and fourth centuries (Taylor 1990: 319–320). There is no evidence that these people understood following Jesus to imply a break with these Jewish practices. Taylor suggests that the patristic term ‘Ebionites’ functioned to mass together a variety of persons or groups ‘who followed Jewish customs for various reasons and in various ways’ in order to present ‘a precise identifiable heresy.... It is by no means the case that they would have defined themselves as sectarian or given themselves a name’ (1990: 324). The apparent existence of a monolithic movement of Ebionites is the effect of patristic discourse, not a sociological fact. Attempts to imagine Jewish Christianity as an essential, homogeneous type of Christianity with a fixed set of characteristics result in imprecision, because the

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phenomena are multiform and fluid—and not only Christianity, but Judaism and practices of Jewish identity formation are diverse and complex in this period (Cohen 1999; Boyarin 2004). If instead we ask how early Christians variously construed ‘Judaism’ and ‘Judaizing’, how they defined their relationship to this ‘Judaism’, and why defining that relationship was at once so crucial to Christian identity and so end p.76

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved hotly contested, then we get at one of the single most important foci of Christian practices of religious identity formation and boundary setting. Even a cursory look at texts that explicitly take up the issue of the relationship to Judaism not only reveals a wide range of positions, but also indicates the multiple ways in which early Christians mapped differences, both from Judaism (or ‘paganism’) and from each other (heresy). Those mappings did a variety of different kinds of work: setting boundaries, marking the limits of internal difference, and supplying intellectual materials for constructive theology and ethics. In each case we have to ask: What difference makes a difference? What work does it do? What is at stake? For example, for Paul the difference that makes a difference is accepting Jesus as the Christ by receiving the Holy Spirit in baptism. He uses this difference to redefine the borders of Israel by including Gentiles who accepted Jesus Christ, while excluding Jews who did not (Rom 11: 17–24). At stake is not only the possibility of eternal life, but membership in the church of the saints, and all that entailed. In Paul's economy of salvation, circumcision and table purity were differences that ceased to matter—a point of considerable tension (Gal 2). Through the next two millennia, however, Paul's letters would be put to work that exceeded any intention of Paul's. Indeed, at some point in that history Paul ceased to be a Jew altogether and was refigured into one of the great Christian founders of orthodoxy. He became the apostle of Gentile Christianity, who defined the true Christianity of faith and love over against a dead Judaism of law and works—a distortion only slowly being corrected in the face of contemporary Jewish—Christian relations in a post-Holocaust world (Stendahl 1976; Boyarin 1994: 136–57). In fact, the meaning of Paul's letters has never been stable—even in their first reading—but shifts with the ways in which Christians (and Jews) define Judaism and its relationship to Christianity. This instability is apparent not only in ancient disputes about circumcision and table practices, but also in contemporary Christian theological and historical shifts from supersession to ‘parting of the ways’ or shifts in terminology from ‘Late Judaism’ to ‘Early Judaism’ (Becker and Reed 2003: 1–24). These moves coincide with shifts in the positionality of Christians: from a divided and persecuted minority to persecutors of Jews and heretics; from post-Holocaust ecumenism to post-colonialism's attention to the hybridity of Judaisms and Christianities. This complex history clearly shows that there was never one definitive ‘parting of the ways’ between Judaism and Christianity accomplished at one time once and for all (Lieu 2002: 11–29). Nor are processes of boundary setting one-sided (Boyarin 1999, 2004). Rather, the processes of mutual definition and self-definition never really ended, but had to be—and continue to be—constantly renegotiated. What is at stake in the ways that Christians define Judaism is the very nature of Christianity itself, because defining the appropriate relationship to Jews and Judaism was, and is, deeply implicated in basic aspects of Christian self-understanding, including the proper interpretation of scripture and the role of Jesus Christ in salvation. end p.77

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© Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved If we turn now to non-Pauline Christian literature from the early centuries, we might attempt to illustrate early Christian diversity by mapping the strategic discourses defining the relationship of Christianity to Judaism on a continuum from identity and accommodation (Gospel of Matthew) to supersession (Hebrews) and even outright rejection (Marcion). That would usefully illustrate variety, but it would not adequately show that our early sources are not all speaking about the same thing when they talked about Jews, Judaism, and Judaizing; nor are the distinctions they are making all doing the same kind of work. For example, the Testimony of Truth (IX, 3) from Nag Hammadi states that the mission of Christ was to bring ‘the dominion of carnal procreation to an end’. It condemns all those Christians who were bound by the ‘old leaven of the Pharisees and the scribes of the Law’, which leads them to marry and beget children according to the commands of Moses in Genesis (Testimony of Truth, 29. 6–30. 30). It goes on to vilify everyone who believed in the saving value of baptism, martyrdom, and the resurrection of the flesh. Ignatius of Antioch, on the other hand, identified Judaizing with circumcision and Sabbath observance (not procreation), and his advocacy of martyrdom strongly affirmed the bodily nature of Christ's death and the resurrection of the flesh. These differences are not primarily about affirming or denying the body, but illustrate different deployments of body symbolism to articulate different theological positions in support of different social projects. The concern of the Testimony of Truth is to authorize the abstemious practices of a developing ascetic tradition, while Ignatius is using his authority as an about-to-be martyr to restore unity under the authority of the monarchical episcopate in Antioch (Schoedel 1980). For both Ignatius and the Testimony of Truth, defining the nature of ‘Judaism’ simultaneously served to set borders with Judaism and to charge Christian ‘heretics’ with Judaizing. But note how they map ‘Judaizing heresy’ differently onto the social world of early Christianity. Ignatius is usually read as a proto-orthodox theologian opposed to Judaizers (‘Jewish Christians’) and docetists (‘Gnostics’). The Testimony of Truth would regard as heretics not only the so-called proto-orthodox, but also Valentinus, Isidore, Simonians, and perhaps Basilides—central figures of so-called Gnosticism—even though modern scholars generally classify the Testimony of Truth as itself Gnostic! Like ‘Jewish Christianity’, the category of ‘Gnostic’ is generally confusing vis-à-vis Christian relationships to Judaism, since texts classed under that rubric express a broad range of strategic relations to Jewish tradition. The Gospel of Thomas (II, 2) builds its Christology primarily from Jewish Wisdom literature, and interprets much of Jesus's teaching in the light of Genesis and Wisdom literature (Davies 1983; Pagels 1999). The Gospel of Mary, on the other hand, interprets the sayings tradition of Jesus without regard to Jewish thought at all; even Jesus's command not to set down laws ‘like the lawgiver’ is less a reference to Jewish Law than a caution against Christians themselves setting up rules and regulations beyond what Jesus commanded them: for example, in refusing to honour Mary Magdalene's end p.78

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved teaching because she is a woman who received private instruction from the Lord (King 2003a). The Apocryphon of John offers yet another model, placing Hebrew scriptures at the centre of Christ's revelation—but in order to correct them; thus Jewish scriptures are fundamental to understanding the world, but only in the light of Christ's corrective revelation (King 2006). Implied here are very different ways of defining the relationship of Christianity to Jewish scripture and tradition. Additional examples only increase the confusion, further undermining the simplistic and misleading stereotype that ‘Gnostics rejected Jewish scripture’.

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Some did, some didn't; those who did, did so differently. The point here is that an account of early Christian diversity aimed at mapping the strategic construction of early Christian identities vis-à-vis constructions of Judaism would not result in the categories of Jewish Christianity, Hellenistic Christianity, Gnosticism, Apocalypticism, and early Catholicism. Nor can the multiformity of the early Christian phenomena be adequately represented by a bifurcating frame, whether orthodoxy versus heresy or the so-called ‘parting of the ways’. If we return to the initial list defining Jewish Christianity, we can now see that one reason why it is so imprecise is that a single category is trying to serve a variety of different purposes: notably, to chart continuities between Judaism and Christianity; to establish clear boundaries between them; to construct a usable Judaism against which to define Christianity; and to mark the limits of (un)acceptable difference within the group vis-à-vis Judaism (variously constructed). What the list does, then, is to illustrate several strategies of early Christian identity formation, strategies which do not necessarily reproduce the historical contours of distinct groups or persons, practices, and ideas that define the character and social make-up of a particular type of early Christianity. Indeed, it is arguable that early Christian discourses of difference themselves produced certain effects, which modern scholarship tends to reproduce. They invented whole cloth groups that never existed, such as Epiphanius's ‘Stratiotics’ and ‘Socratites’ (Pan. 1. 35. 3, 5; F. Williams 1987: 236), turned multiform phenomena into monolithic entities (Ebionism and Gnosticism), and produced schismatic churches by exacerbating minor differences into intolerable otherness (Montanism; Tabbernee 1985; 1997: 23–4; Trevett 1996). Thomassen (2004) has suggested that the rhetoric of church unity itself may have led to division. Some Christians (such as Hermas, Marcion, and Valentinus) came to regard diversity as intolerable and attempted reforms that were intended to institute moral, ritual, and/or doctrinal uniformity, but had the concomitant effect of hardening internal differences. In practice, early Christian discourses of difference operated by treating differences differently: some are emphasized or even created; others are harmonized to make them disappear; others are simply ignored, never rising to the level of discursive employment. Constructing the impression of unity out of all this multiformity required emphasizing or even manufacturing similarities (often through harmonization) while ignoring differences. In contrast, excluding heretics meant emphasizing end p.79

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved or even manufacturing differences while overlooking similarities. The result is that it becomes difficult for us to see the immense common territory that those who are labelled heretics shared with other Christians; where the real differences between them lie and what is at stake; and where there is (perhaps mutual) incomprehension, either because they simply had different theological interests or because they sidestepped, ignored, or simply failed to be cognizant of the interests of the other (King 2003b: 30; and forthcoming). A more adequate analysis would replace the division of early Christianity into static and inaccurate types, which do little more than reproduce or (slightly) readjust the boundary-setting enterprises of ancient discourses of orthodoxy and heresy, with an analysis of the full range of early Christian practices of mapping difference and identity. While not all diversity is about identity formation or boundary setting, this approach would serve to illustrate the dynamics of early Christian practice, and it would simultaneously restore a fuller and more accurate portrait of early Christian diversity, including a place for those whose perspectives have been marginalized, silenced, or inadequately engaged

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critically.

3.4 New Contexts/New Questions Why the urgency surrounding the question ‘Which early Christianity?’ Certainly as J. Z. Smith argues, consideration of difference is fundamental to constructions of both self and other (2004: 230–302). The old categories and assumptions are widely criticized as inadequate—both to a disciplined analysis of the evidence and to addressing the crucial questions of identity, belonging, hierarchies, and exclusions raised so poignantly in our current post-colonial and pluralistic world. The ancient discourse rhetorically linked sameness with right belief and unity (orthodoxy) and difference with error and schism (heresy); but contemporary theory recognizes that difference is not in itself a problem. Our differences are constitutive of who we are. The problems are injustice, suffering, and other forms of evil. A reproduction of difference solely as deviant divisiveness will not further religious understanding in pluralistic societies. The analysis I propose here aims to get at practice (see esp. Bourdieu 1990; Schatzki 2002), not a fixed and essentialized categorization of early Christian multiformity. The results of this historiographical method would be to demonstrate where and how the ‘textual’ resources, cultural codes, literary themes, hermeneutical strategies, and social-political interests of various rhetorical acts of Christian literary production, theological reflection, ritual and ethical practices, and social construction simultaneously form multiple overlapping continuities, disjunctures, end p.80

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved contradictions, and discontinuities, both locally and trans-locally. Such historiographical enterprises will result in more than one ‘true and authentic’ account of early Christian diversity, but not in a narrative of Christian triumph or a naturalization of the development of orthodoxy, since they would chart the ongoing processes of constructing ‘orthodoxy’ through rhetorical-political acts of erasure, harmonization, and fiat within the complex of identity practices in the ancient Mediterranean world. And tradition is never the whole story of identity; it is only a part of the mix. As Homi K. Bhabha writes, ‘[R]estaging the past... introduces other, incommensurable cultural temporalities into the invention of tradition. This process estranges any immediate access to an originary identity or a “received” tradition.’ Bhabha describes cultural change as a process in which breaking and joining occur simultaneously, in which ‘the terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively’ (1994: 2). It eschews the identity politics of anti-syncretistic rhetoric by refusing to assume, construct, or reify essentialist categories of religious identity. Hybridity, not purity, characterizes historical processes. Such approaches would note throughout what was at stake, and for whom. Given the role of religion in constructing personal and national identities and the manifest involvement of religion in violence, such reflexivity is necessary. Current constructions of religious difference—including ecumenism, multiculturalism, and hybridity, affirmations of distinctiveness and programmes of separateness, secularization, and fundamentalism—can all be found in academic discussions of diversity. For some, the affirmation of diversity supplies more complex resources to think about the complex issues of our time, as well as new perspectives for critical-constructive engagement with tradition. For others, the very idea of legitimate diversity undermines the authority and exclusive claims of

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scripture, dogma, and established structures of church leadership. For myself and others, the ethical point that follows from diversity is not relativism, but the need to take responsibility for how scripture and tradition are read and appropriated. Whatever the project, however, it is best served by historical reconstruction that is based in an adequate comprehension of the multifarious practices of early Christians, including their constructions of identity and difference. Note 1.

He twice cites Ernst Käsemann: ‘the New Testament canon does not, as such, constitute the foundation for the unity of the church. On the contrary, as such (i.e. in its accessibility to the historian) it provides the basis for the multiplicity of the confessions’ (Dunn 1977: 122, 376).

end p.81

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Suggested Reading The following are recommended: Bauer (1971); Boyarin (2004); Buell (2005); Clark (2004); Cohen (1999); King (2003); Lieu (2004); Schüssler Fiorenza (1985); Taylor (1990). Bibliography

BAUER, W. (1971), Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press); trans. from German, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei in ältesten Christentum (1932), by a team from the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins, ed. R. A. Kraft and G. Krodel, new edn., with added appendices, by G. Strecker (Mifflintown, Pa.: Sigler Press, 1996). BAUR, F. C. (1878, 1879), The Church History of the First Three Centuries, 2 vols., 3rd edn. (Edinburgh: Williams & Norgate). BECKER, A. H., and REED, A. Y. (2003) (eds.), The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck). BHABHA, H. K. (2004), The Location of Culture (London: Routledge; originally published 1994). BOURDIEU, P. (1990), The Logic of Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press). BOYARIN, D. (1994), A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press). —— 1999, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press).

—— 2004, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

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BUELL, D. K. (2005), Why This New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press). CLARK, E. A. (2004), History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). COHEN, S. J. D. (1999), The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press). DAVIES, S. L. (1983), The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom (New York: Seabury Press). DUNDERBERG, I. (1997), ‘John and Thomas in Conflict?’, in the Proceedings of the 1995 Society of Biblical Literature Commemoration, J. D. Turner and A. McGuire (eds.), The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years, NHMS 44 (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 361–80. DUNN, James D. G. (1977), Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press).

EHRMAN, B. D. (2003), Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford: Oxford University Press). HARNACK, A. (1957), What is Christianity? (New York: Harper Torchbooks).

JANEN, M. (1999), ‘Mystagogus Gnosticus? Zur Gattung der “gnostischen Gespräche des Auferstandenen”,’, in G. Lüdemann (ed.), Studien zur Gnosis, Arbeiten zur Religion und Geschichte des Urchristentums, 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang), 21–260. end p.82

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved JONES, F. S. (1997 [1990]), ‘Ebionites’, in E. Ferguson (ed.), M. McHugh and F. W. Norris (assoc. eds.), Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, 2nd edn. (New York: Garland Publishing), 287–88. KING, K. L. (2003a), The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Polebridge Press). —— (2003b), What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

KING, K. L.—— (2006), The Secret Revelation of John (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). —— (forthcoming), ‘Social and Theological Effects of Heresiological Discourse’, in

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E. Iricinschi and H. Zellentin (eds.), Making Selves and Marking Others: Heresy and Self-Definition in Late Antiquity (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck). KOESTER, H. (1982), Introduction to the New Testament: History and Literature of Early Christianity, ii (Philadelphia: Fortress Press; originally published in German, 1980). LAMPE, P. (2003), From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). LE BOULLUEC, A. (1985), Le Notion d'hérésie dans la littérature grecque II e –III

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siècles (Paris: Études augustiniennes). LIEU, J. M. (2002), Neither Jew Nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (London: T & T Clark). —— (2004), Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press). MARTIN, D. B. (1995), The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press).

MILLER, M. P. (2004), ‘Antioch, Paul, and Jerusalem: Diaspora Myths of Origins in the Homeland’, in R. Cameron and M. P. Miller (eds.), Redescribing Christian Origins, SBL symposium, 28 (Atlanta: SBL), 177–235. ORTNER, S. B. (1997), ‘Introduction’, Representations, 59: 1–13. PAGELS, E. P. (1999), ‘Exegesis of Genesis 1 in the Gospels of Thomas and John’, JBL 118/3: 477–96. RILEY , G. (1995), Resurrection Reconsidered: Thomas and John in Conflict (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). ROBINSON, J. M., and KOESTER, H. (1971), Trajectories through Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). SCHATZKI, T. R. (2002), The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press). SCHOEDEL, W. R. (1980), ‘Theological Norms and Social Perspectives in Ignatius of Antioch’, in E. P. Sanders (ed.), Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, i: The Shaping of Christianity in the Second and Third Centuries. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 30–56. SCHÜSSLER FIORENZA, E. (1985), In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad). SCHÜSSLER FIORENZA, E.—— (1999), Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical

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Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). SCHWEITZER, A. (1954), The Mystery of the Kingdom of God: The Secret of Jesus' Messiahship and Passion, trans. W. Lowrie (New York: MacMillan). SMITH, J. Z. (1982), ‘Fences and Neighbors: Some Contours of Early Judaism’, in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1–18. SMITH, J. Z.—— (2004), Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). STENDAHL, K. (1976), Paul among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). end p.83

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved STRECKER, G. (1971), ‘On the Problem of Jewish Christianity’, in Bauer (1971), 241–85. TABBERNEE, W. (1985), ‘Early Montanism and Voluntary Martyrdom’, Colloquium, 17: 33–44. —— (1997), Montanist Inscriptions and Testimonia: Epigraphic Sources Illustrating the History of Montanist, PMS 16 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press). TAYLOR, J. E. (1990), ‘The Phenomenon of Early Jewish-Christianity: Reality or Scholarly Invention?’, VC 44: 313–34. THOMASSEN, E. (2004), ‘Orthodoxy and Heresy in Second-Century Rome’, HTR 97/3: 241–56. TREVETT, D. (1996), Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). VEER, P. (1994), ‘Syncretism, Multiculturalism and the Discourse of Tolerance’, in C. Stewart and R. Shaw (eds.), Syncretism/Anti-syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis, European Association of Social Anthropologists VAN DER

(London: Routledge), 196–211. VASQUEZ, M. A. (2005), ‘Historicizing and Materializing the Study of Religion: The Contribution of Migration Studies’, in K. I. Leonard, A. Stepick, M. A. Vasquez, and J. Holdaway (eds.), Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press), 219–42. WEISS, J. (1985), Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (Chico, Calif.:

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Scholars Press). WILLIAMS, F. (1987), The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis: Book 1 (Sects 1–46), NHS 35 (Leiden: E. J. Brill). WILLIAMS, M. A. (1996), Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press). WIRE, A. C. (1990), The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul's Rhetoric (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). end p.84

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [87]-[103]

4 Material Evidence (1): Archaeology Mark Humphries Abstract: Introduction: The Tomb of St Paul? – Early Christian Archaeology between Dogma and Discipline – Categories, Evidence, and Interpretation – Towards an Archaeology of Early Christianity Keywords: Christ, Christianity, Dogma, Christian, discipline

4.1 Introduction: The Tomb of St Paul? O N 6 December 2006 Vatican officials announced to an excited world that excavations at the great basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura (St Paul outside the Walls), located just south of Rome, had revealed a sarcophagus that might well have been the repository for the remains of the apostle Paul. In the international news media, the discovery was reported with breathless speculations as to whether the sarcophagus was indeed Paul's final resting place. By contrast, the official communiqué issued by archaeologist Giorgio Filippi on 11 December via the Vatican Press Office was more measured in tone, giving a detailed description of the materials and dimensions of the artefact unearthed. Whereas the media were mesmerized by the possibility that the bones of a biblical figure had been unearthed, Filippi was more concerned to locate the sarcophagus in the archaeological context presented by the church itself, particularly the two different phases of construction in the fourth century associated with the emperors Constantine (306–37) and Theodosius I (379–95).1 end p.87

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Filippi's discovery at San Paolo fuori le Mura and popular reactions to it are quite revealing of attitudes to the archaeology of early Christianity. The media hype generated by the prospect of the discovery of St Paul's remains is symptomatic of a general sensationalism that attaches to any ‘scientific’ discovery that might have a bearing on proving the veracity or otherwise of Christian scripture. In that respect, reaction to the discovery is not unique: similar lurid speculations have been provoked particularly by investigations into the supposed archaeological evidence for Jesus Christ himself. Famous recent examples are an ossuary (burial casket) that emerged on the Israeli antiquities market, and which was claimed to belong to James the brother of Jesus, and the tomb found in the Jerusalem suburb of Talpiot (sometimes spelled Talpiyot) that was claimed to be the family sepulchre of Jesus, his mother Mary, and Mary Magdalene; both contentions have garnered considerable attention in the media, but have been roundly rejected by professional biblical scholars (Scham 2003; Magness 2005, 2007). In the case of the December 2006 Vatican announcement, what is perhaps most striking about the popular response to it is the emphasis on the discovery as possibly providing a tangible link to a key personality from the New Testament; in stark contrast,

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scant attention was paid in media reports to the post-biblical archaeological context in which the discovery was made. At the same time, however much the excavations may have been reported in a clinical archaeological language that stressed contexts, dimensions, and materials, they were inspired by a similar concern to gain access to a biblical personality. The church of San Paolo fuori le Mura has long been a destination of pilgrims, and the search for the tomb of St Paul was initiated in order to make it more accessible to modern Christians wishing to venerate the apostle. Perhaps it will seem overly sensationalist to begin an essay on material evidence for early Christianity with examples of the intersection of archaeology, pseudoarchaeology, and media attention. Yet such instances are revealing in themselves of some of the tensions that surround archaeological investigations of the early Christians. In particular, they demonstrate that, quite unlike most other branches of archaeological inquiry, the study of the early Christian material record frequently excites extraordinary emotions, with the attendant risk that sober analysis will suffer. While such concerns will be attached particularly to discoveries associated with the period of the New Testament, the study of early Christian archaeology as a whole has often been held in tension between what might be termed ‘dogmatic concerns’ and ‘scientific archaeology’. Thus, although this chapter will survey the range of archaeological evidence for early Christianity and the potential avenues of inquiry that it opens up for modern scholars, it seems sensible to begin with a critical summary of how the study of early Christian archaeology has developed, and how interpretations have often been driven by interests extraneous to the evidence itself. end p.88

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4.2 Early Christian Archaeology between Dogma and Discipline If Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea merits the title ‘father’ of church history, then his contemporary Helena Augusta, mother of the emperor Constantine, could well deserve that of ‘mother’ of Christian archaeology (Frend 1996: 1–5). To be sure, Helena's quest for holy sites in Jerusalem such as Golgotha and the tomb of Christ was guided more by prayer than by anything that remotely resembles modern archaeological practice (cf. Eusebius, Vit. Const. 3. 28); but her desire to seek out places associated with the origins of Christianity is not entirely unlike efforts in our own day to uncover the tomb of the apostle Paul in Rome and make it accessible to pilgrims. Moreover, her pious search for material evidence sets the tone for much subsequent investigation of Christian archaeology, in that for centuries the discipline was associated above all with seeking proofs for particular beliefs. This can be illustrated neatly by consideration of what are perhaps the most celebrated archaeological sites associated with early Christianity: the subterranean burial complexes in the catacombs of Rome. They are instructive not only for the variety of evidence that they present to the scholar (tomb complexes, inscriptions, frescoes, and so forth), but also of how dogmatic concerns have influenced the ways in which they have been interpreted. Visits to the catacombs today can—depending on the proclivities of one's guide—quickly turn into exercises in the imaginative reconstruction of the grim plight of the ‘church of the martyrs’, where the catacombs are cast as furtive places of sanctuary for ‘good’ Christians cruelly oppressed by ‘wicked’ pagans. This essentially emotional response is not just uncritical pious fancy, but is rooted in long-established traditions of interpreting the catacombs. They were in continuous use from the second century onwards, either for burial or as places where the tombs of martyrs could be venerated (Rutgers 2000: 53–81). Already

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in the fourth century, we find evidence of them being renovated to facilitate worship: many inscriptions attest the activity of Pope Damasus I (366–84) in restoring various catacombs to make accessible the resting places of martyrs (Grig 2004: 127–34). Such redevelopments of the catacombs continued into the early Middle Ages, as is attested, for instance, by the construction in the seventh century of the beautiful basilica of S. Agnese on the Via Nomentana, built over catacombs associated with that martyr (Crook 2000: 89). At the same time, however, many martyr relics were being removed from their original tombs and translated to churches both within Rome and further afield, so that by the end of the ninth century, the catacombs were no longer the resting places of the martyrs and came to be all but abandoned (Ghilardi 2002). It was only in the sixteenth century that rediscovery of the catacombs began in earnest, when the first effort to catalogue them was undertaken by Antonio Bosio end p.89

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved (1575–1629). His Roma Sotteranea (‘Subterranean Rome’), published posthumously in four volumes in 1634, established the catacombs once more as venerable monuments of Christian antiquity, particularly from the age of the martyrs (Rutgers 2000: 15–25). Yet Bosio's work, however foundational it might have been for subsequent study of the catacombs, was hardly scientific archaeology in the modern sense. His investigations were sponsored by the papacy and were not unrelated to the broader tides of religious history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In particular, the Protestant Reformation challenged papal authority, based on succession to St Peter, over western Christendom, to which the Roman Church responded by reaffirming its continuous history from apostolic times. In this enterprise, the evidence of the catacombs played a key role: here, it seemed, was proof that the Christian community at Rome, and with it the papacy, could trace its origins back to the age of Jesus's disciples. By contrast, Protestant scholars maintained that the catacombs in fact testified to the corruption of post-apostolic Christianity by pagan culture, and that as such they undermined the authority of the Roman Church (Frend 1996: 17). With the advent of what might be termed more scientific approaches to archaeology in the nineteenth century, such explicitly theological interpretations of the evidence might be expected to have receded. In some respects they did: a new thorough study of the catacombs, Roma sotteranea cristiana (‘Subterranean Christian Rome’), by Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822–94) was guided by the author's insistence that he was ‘an archaeologist, not a theologian’ (quoted in Rutgers 2000: 34). Even so, a determination to view the material evidence of early Christianity through a confessional lens proved difficult to dislodge. For instance, as recently as 1929, the director of the Pontifical Commission for Christian Archaeology could publish a book that not only began with a diatribe against Protestant archaeologists but that also regarded evidence from the catacombs as ‘confirming the present Catholic faith’ (Marucchi 1929: 25). Similar concerns impelled Pope Pius XII (1939–58) to inaugurate his pontificate with a quest for the tomb of St Peter under the Vatican basilica (Toynbee and Ward-Perkins 1956). Only in the last 40 years has catacomb archaeology come into line with other branches of the discipline, in that new discoveries are laboriously investigated, and small finds, such as ceramics, meticulously catalogued, where once they might have been discarded in a mad scramble for the tombs of martyrs (Rutgers 2000: 39–41). In some respects it is hardly surprising that the evidence of the Roman catacombs should have been interpreted in such an explicitly theological manner: the status and authority of the Roman Church often meant that there was more

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at stake for some scholars than simply matters of archaeological import. Yet similar tendencies have bedevilled the interpretation of archaeological evidence from other parts of the Mediterranean world. Excavations at Capernaum in Galilee, for example, have revealed an octagonal church structure which, according to the testimony of sixth-century pilgrims, was dedicated to the apostle Peter and associated with a house end p.90

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved that scripture records him as occupying in the village (Mark 1: 29; White 1996–7: ii. 154–5). Modern investigation of the site was conducted by members of the Franciscan Order. They were most insistent on identifying a first-century house underneath the later church as actually belonging to Peter, and argued, in a way that is difficult (even impossible) to sustain from the evidence itself, that it quickly became a place of Christian worship (thus Hoppe 1994: 81–9; cf. Reed 2000: 142; White 1996–7: ii. 153). This determination to read archaeological evidence through the prism of New Testament texts might be comprehensible in a case where, like Capernaum, a discovery was made at a place mentioned in scripture. Nevertheless, biblical texts have been used to interpret material data even when found in places far removed from the lands of the New Testament. In 1931, French and American archaeologists working at Dura Europos, a city on the Roman Empire's Euphrates frontier, excavated a Christian building of third-century date (Kraeling 1967). The structure is usually known as a ‘house church’, a term that derives ultimately from the descriptions in the letters of Paul of gatherings of the faithful in domestic settings (e.g. 1 Cor 16: 19; cf. White 1996–7: i. 4–9, 103–10). Moreover, at the time of the discovery, scholars regarded it as important precisely because it seemed to offer a window onto the experience of Christians in the apostolic age (Filson 1939), in spite of the fact that it dates from nearly two centuries after Paul's time and is located far outside the Palestinian and Aegean milieux of Paul's activities. It is a regrettable fact that much Christian archaeology has been driven by interpretations generated within a framework informed above all by dogmatic concerns, while paying only scant attention to the broader socio-cultural context within which the material evidence survives. Happily, more recent work has begun to challenge this ideologically driven view and, far from regarding the archaeological evidence for early Christianity in isolation, has sought to examine it in a broader context, including evidence pertaining to other religious groups, such as Jews and worshippers of Mithras (White 1996–7). These analyses point to new possibilities in the study of early Christian archaeology, and to those we now turn.

4.3 Categories, Evidence, and Interpretation The archaeological evidence available for the study of early Christianity is extraordinarily diverse, even for the period before the religion was accorded toleration under Constantine (Snyder 2003). Scholars have traditionally prioritized the remains of church buildings, whether of small so-called house churches like that at end p.91

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Dura Europos, or of large basilicas like those that appeared in cities throughout the Roman Empire between the fourth century and the sixth. Other artefacts that have commanded considerable attention are those that fall in the category of early Christian art, such as sculpted sarcophagi, elegantly wrought metalwork, and frescoes and mosaics. Such a concentration on art and architecture (e.g. Beckwith 1979; Brandenburg 2006; Kock 1996; Krautheimer 1986; Milburn 1988) might be regarded as having hindered a sensitive appreciation of what archaeology can tell us about early Christianity, just as much as dogmatic agendas have. Like the art-historical approach that once dominated classical archaeology, it tended to lay most emphasis on great works of elite production and consumption, and to interpret them primarily in aesthetic terms, rather than using the full range of evidence to suggest interpretations of early Christian history that go beyond what can be known from written sources alone. A number of examples will demonstrate both the pitfalls of that rigidly art-historical approach and the possibilities offered by a more holistic approach to the material evidence. Among the most important archaeological discoveries pertaining to Christianity in the pre-Constantinian era is the aforementioned Christian building at Dura Europos. The significance of the find is enhanced by the fact that it can be dated with unusual precision. Dura Europos, a strategic fortress town on the Roman Empire's eastern frontier, was utterly destroyed in a Persian attack of 256, thus giving a terminal date for the building. Meanwhile, a graffito on a layer of plaster underneath that of the Christian structure means ‘the year 544’ in the local Seleucid era which began in 312/311 BCE, thus giving 231/2 CE as the date after which the building was remodelled for Christian use (White 1996–7: ii. 132 n. 6). Thus we have an early Christian building that was in use for, at most, about 25 years in the mid-third century. Moreover, it was converted for use by Christians from a pre-existing domestic structure. These renovations included knocking together two rooms to create an assembly hall with a speaker's platform at one end and the construction of a baptismal font in another room that was decorated with frescoes depicting scenes from scripture. This is clearly an archaeological site of paramount importance. All too often, however, its various components are studied in isolation, with the paintings considered separately from the architecture, and the graffiti separately again (e.g. Snyder 2003: 70, 128–34, 263–5). At one level this approach is readily comprehensible: it often makes sense to distinguish different categories of evidence, both for detailed analysis and for ease of presentation in handbooks. Even so, this atomized treatment of the evidence can hinder a more nuanced interpretation of the archaeological assemblage as a whole. This would enable us to examine side by side the various elements that make up the building: to interpret its development from private house to church; to consider what bearing the subjects chosen for the fresco cycle in the baptistery might tell us about the attitudes of Dura Europos's Christians to initiation and scripture; and to speculate as to the social profile of the community end p.92

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved that used the building (White 1996–7: ii. 123–34). We might go further too. The church building at Dura Europos's was one of several domestic structures in the city renovated to provide a cult space: elsewhere we find houses remodelled to serve as a Jewish synagogue and as temples of Mithras and the Palmyrene deity Gadd (Wharton 1995: 27–9; White 1996–7: i. 40–4, ii. 261–300). If we bring these examples to bear on our analysis of the Christian building, then we can view it not only in terms of its uniqueness, as a well-preserved pre-Constantinian church, but also in the way in which it suggests that local Christians, by remodelling a pre-existing structure to serve their needs, were following a

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procedure of architectural adaptation already pursued by other religious groups in the city (White 1996–7: i. 144). An analogous problem of contextualization is presented by the ecclesiastical buildings, ranging in date from the fifth century to the seventh, in the upland regions of Syria. Their spectacular remains, such as those of the monastery at Qal'at Si'man built around the pillar atop which the monk St Simeon Stylites (c. 390–459) famously spent many years, impress in large measure by their extraordinary condition of preservation. When they were first discovered by archaeologists in the mid-nineteenth century, they were often regarded as precursors of architectural forms that would reach their apogee in the Romanesque style of western Europe in the central Middle Ages. Such interpretations, it is now clear, reflect the imperfect knowledge base upon which nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architectural historians based their interpretations (Krautheimer 1986: 136–7). Even so, studies of the ecclesiastical buildings of Syria have continued to prioritize the notion that they can be analysed as examples of developmental trends in Christian architecture, such as the evolution of the so-called house church (White 1996–7: ii. 135–51). Only more recently have scholars sought to locate them in their specific regional context, and to elucidate their architectural peculiarities through comparison with the extensive ruins of fifth- to seventh-century villages with which they were associated (Kidner 2001). Not all archaeological evidence for early Christianity is quite so spectacular as that unearthed at Dura Europos or preserved on the Syrian plateau. If we turn our attention to Britain at the opposite end of the Roman Empire, we find that the material record for early Christianity is very different. Evidence for church buildings from the period of Roman occupation (before c. 410) is slight, in stark contrast to the wealth of evidence from the sixth and later centuries (Blair 2005: 65–71). Moreover, the identification as churches of some Romano-British structures with halls and apses, such as those at Silchester and Colchester, has been vigorously disputed (Esmonde-Cleary 1989: 124). Apart from churches, most attention has focused on evidence from a number of villas that bear Christian symbols: for example, the frescoes from Lullingstone and the mosaic pavements from Hinton St Mary and Frampton (e.g. Cookson 1987). The attention lavished on such remains probably reflects the priorities of the art-historical approach to Christian archaeology noted above. Yet the bulk of Christian material from Britain is much less spectacular, end p.93

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved consisting mainly of small finds—such as lead tanks and small metal, bone, or ceramic objects—marked with Christian symbols. Nevertheless, careful study of such artefacts—for example, by plotting their provenances on distribution maps—can allow speculative conclusions to be drawn about the nature and extent of Romano-British Christianity (Thomas 1981; Mawer 1995). The differences between the archaeological evidence provided by the buildings in Dura Europos and Syria, on the one hand, and the predominantly small finds from Britain, on the other, should warn us that we ought not to presume that the material record for early Christianity will conform to monolithic expectations. Similarly, we ought to be wary of efforts to force the archaeological material to fit narratives of early Christian history derived from literary sources. Recent work on the city of Rome in late antiquity highlights the pitfalls of such an approach. Only a quarter of a century ago, it was possible to envisage the history of Rome between the reign of Constantine and the pontificate of Gregory the Great as witnessing an eclipse of imperial power by the rising authority of the Roman church. Archaeological evidence was marshalled in support of this thesis, as

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attention was drawn to such awe-inspiring structures as basilicas like Santa Sabina, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano, and so forth. This evidence, it was argued, demonstrated that control of space within the city was quickly monopolized by the church to the detriment of secular powers such as the emperor and the senate (e.g. Krautheimer 1980). In recent decades, however, new excavations have revealed a wealth of new data for this period that has led scholars to reappraise the urban evolution of Rome between antiquity and the Middle Ages (Marazzi 2000). Thus, where once the fifth century was regarded as a period when Rome was dominated by papal building projects, we now have evidence of secular building, including a large new imperial palace on the Pincian hill (Broise, Dewailly, and Jolivet 2000). Consequently, fifth-century Rome is no longer regarded as a city increasingly in thrall to the papacy, but one where established secular grandees like emperors and senators continued to play an active role in determining the shape of the urban landscape (Humphries 2007; Machado, forthcoming). At the same time, these new discoveries have prompted careful reconsideration of older archaeological evidence, so that the construction of Christian basilicas can be seen within a broader context of building activity in the city at this time (Cecchelli 2001). The example of fifth-century Rome is a reminder that the archaeological evidence for early Christianity needs to be interpreted in a manner that is sensitive to other forces in the matrix of society. To these might be added other religious groups. Attention was drawn earlier to the Christian catacombs of Rome. While study of these tomb complexes has tended to focus on Christian material, it ought to be borne in mind that they have also produced evidence for pagan and Jewish burials, and that these suggest that the same workshops produced such items as sarcophagi, gold glass, and ceramic lamps for pagans and Jews as well as Christians (Rutgers 1995: 50–99; cf. Elsner 2003). As a consequence, our interpretation of the end p.94

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved archaeological material from Rome's Christian catacombs must allow for interaction between religious groups rather than see them evolving in isolation from—or in opposition to—one another. Other instances are indicative of the same trend. If late antiquity is often regarded as the era in which Palestine developed into a Christian Holy Land (Parker 1999b), it must also account for evidence such as that from Capernaum which shows that the church associated with St Peter was first constructed around the same time as a large synagogue complex that lay only some 20 metres away (Hoppe 1994: 33–40). Indeed, the late antique period saw the construction of numerous synagogues throughout Galilee, meaning that any view of the ‘Christianization’ of this landscape must be tempered by recognition of the continued vitality of Judaism in the region (Stemberger 2000: 121–60), together with an acknowledgement that Judaism and Christianity, far from being diametrically opposed to one another, probably interacted dynamically with each other (Boyarin 2004). If evidence for Judaism is, relatively speaking, plentiful, the same cannot be said for late paganism. One instance will suffice to demonstrate the complexity of the issues. The cult of Mithras has often, if erroneously (Clauss 2000: 168–72), been seen as representing a serious challenge to Christianity, and it has been speculated on the basis of literary notices (e.g. Jerome, Ep. 107. 2) that it was the victim of a deliberate campaign of suppression by Christians in the fourth century. Others have argued that the cult was already defunct by the end of the fourth century, and simply faded out of existence (Martin 1989). Reassessment of the archaeological evidence for Mithraism in late antiquity suggests, however, that neither interpretation adequately explains the end of the cult. In some instances, the deliberate concealment of Mithraic cult objects could suggest

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precautions were being taken against Christian attacks; but elsewhere, such as along the Rhine frontier, coin sequences suggest that Mithraic shrines were abandoned in the context of upheavals resulting from barbarian invasions, and that purely religious considerations cannot explain the end of Mithraism in that region (Sauer 1996). In short, then, the archaeological evidence for early Christianity must be interpreted in ways that take account of these multiple contexts and interpretations. It is all too easy to allow Christian buildings and artefacts to dominate our archaeological vision of the period 100–600, especially after the fourth century, and hence to lend support to an essentially teleological narrative of a culture that was becoming increasingly ‘Christianized’. In some respects, of course, that account contains an element of truth: the Mediterranean and adjacent regions were clearly more Christian at the end of the sixth century than at the beginning of the second. Nevertheless, we must not forget that Christianity existed for much of this period cheek by jowl with other religions, and archaeological evidence for them must be adduced if we are not to end up with an unbalanced and simplistic interpretation of the processes by which ‘Christianization’ occurred. end p.95

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Thus far, the analysis offered in this chapter has perhaps been rather cautious in its appraisal of the scope of archaeological evidence to inform our understanding of early Christianity. To conclude, therefore, I want to suggest a number of more positive avenues of inquiry, showing how archaeological data can assist our understanding of the early Christian period. It will hardly surprise readers if at the same time I utter caveats on the limits we must impose on our interpretations of that evidence.

4.4 Towards an Archaeology of Early Christianity In baldly quantifiable terms, the sheer volume of Christian material increases enormously from the fourth century onwards. Remains of church buildings can help us to gauge how Christianity came to dominate not only urban topography, but also the activities of social elites engaged in architectural patronage (WardPerkins 1984: 51–84; Caillet 1993). As always, it is important to see such developments in context. For example, the proliferation of church buildings on the Syrian plateau after 400 needs to be understood as part of a general flourishing of villages in the region in the same period, which occurred in the context of an economic boom (MacAdam 1994). Indeed, socio-economic factors played as significant a role in the transformation of cities in this period as did church building (Ward-Perkins 1998). Nevertheless, the dominant presence of churches in archaeological landscapes essentially supports the picture derived from literary sources that, throughout the Mediterranean region, ecclesiastical hierarchies were coming to exercise important functions of social leadership (Liebeschuetz 2001: 137–68). Sometimes archaeology allows us to examine this process in detail. Recent excavations of a sixth-century church at Petra have revealed not only a well-preserved building decorated with exquisite mosaics, but also a cache of papyrus documents in a room adjoining one of the aisles (Fiema, Kanellopoulos, Waliszewski, and Schick 2001). The contents of the archive suggest that ecclesiastical officials were playing a major role in local administration, and the presence of such a dossier provides us with an opportunity to examine how the growing social dominance of the church in local society worked at a practical level (Frösén, Arjava, and Lehtinen 2002). While the archaeological evidence is often very telling of the processes of social

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transformation, it is more difficult than historians might wish to link it with precise chronological markers drawn from literary data. At late antique Milan, for instance, the enormous suburban basilica of San Lorenzo was built on a platform carefully assembled from some 6,000 stones robbed from the nearby amphitheatre (Kinney end p.96

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved 1972: 98–9). Thus the structure neatly encapsulates the process by which the secular entertainments of the Roman past disappeared under the new Christian dispensation (cf. Ward-Perkins 1984: 92–118). Yet, in spite of its importance, no secure date can be offered for the church (McLynn 1994: 176–8), in spite of efforts to associate it with well-attested historical figures such as Bishop Ambrose of Milan (374–97) or the emperor Theodosius I (Lewis 1973). The difficulty of dating San Lorenzo with precision highlights the problems of seeking to make the archaeological data fit neatly with narratives drawn from literary evidence. In addition to helping us chart the growing social dominance of the church, archaeology can also shed light on the developing cultural profile of early Christianity. Artefacts such as sarcophagi, mosaics, and metalwork reveal how the early Christians were able to adapt the artistic heritage of classical antiquity to their needs. Furthermore, the use of classical iconographic devices, such as elements drawn from classical mythology, in such Christian works allows us to study the way in which Christianity intersected with the classical cultural heritage, and as such neatly complements what can be known from literary sources (Bowersock 2006: 31–63). Similarly, examination of the development of church buildings can demonstrate the extent to which the construction of such edifices was driven by concerns of social status as much as piety. The prominent positions granted in such buildings to inscriptions recording lay elite patronage is particularly revealing of this trend (Caillet 1993). Archaeology can also be revelatory of aspects of the internal life of Christian communities. It is possible, for instance, to elucidate from church buildings something of the liturgies performed within them. That such rituals became more ostentatious is suggested by the growing monumentality of churches, with colonnaded porticoes and processional routes that would have facilitated the performance of grand public ceremonial (Stringer 2005: 26–88). Nevertheless, it is difficult to elucidate exact details of liturgies from the archaeology alone, and it is usually necessary to appeal to texts, such as liturgical manuals, to make sense of the physical evidence (Baldovin 1987; Mathews 1962; Xydis 1949). Even so, archaeological data offer clear support for the considerable variety in liturgical practices in the early Christian world, both from region to region and over time. At the same time, the multiplicity of church types excavated implies that different reasons may explain the choice of a particular form. Analysis of the distribution of b mata (curved platforms for the delivery of prayers) in Syrian churches suggests that the decision to include such structures may have been driven by the influence of the Antiochene church on local patrons (Loosley 2001). Similarly, a large five-aisled basilica recently excavated at Abila in Jordan may have been built as a local imitation of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (Menninga 2004: 43). The scope of archaeology to shed light on the multitudinous variety of early Christianity works best when the material evidence is read side by side with other data, whether literary, epigraphic, or papyrological, and when interpretations are end p.97

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved sensitive to local cultural, economic, and social contexts. From such considerations it is possible to mark out an agenda for the future development of the archaeology of early Christianity. In order to gauge more astutely the broader profile of Christianity in the period 100–600, we plainly need more studies of individual centres and regions, from which a better-informed general picture can be drawn. These have been appearing with ever more frequency in recent years, ranging from detailed examinations of individual cities to broader surveys of larger regions (see the examples cited below in the list of Suggested Reading). While such careful studies undoubtedly contribute to a more subtle appreciation of the general contours of early Christian history, we must also be aware that the archaeological landscape is a mutable one, and that new discoveries can at any time force us to reappraise our general picture. The recent discovery at Aila (modern Aqaba in Jordan) of a building that the excavators believe to be a church dating from before c. 320 provides an example (Parker 1999a). Identification of the structure as a church awaits confirmation, and its implications for our understanding of early Christianity have barely begun to be made: yet this current uncertainty over a new discovery is an exciting reminder of the scope of archaeological evidence to prompt reassessments of how we interpret the world of the early Christians. Note 1.

Filippi's communiqué (in Italian) can be found on the Vatican news website at http://212.77.1.245/news_services/bulletin/news/19405.php?index=19405& po_date=11.12.2006 , consulted March 2007. Suggested Reading

A number of manuals provide an introduction to the various types of evidence: Deichmann (1993), Snyder (2003), and White (1996–7). Beginners should also consult the various syntheses on early Christian art and architecture: Koch (1996) and Milburn (1988) are convenient single-volume surveys, while separate aspects are dealt with in (e.g.) Beckwith (1979) and Krautheimer (1986). In addition, there are two major reference encyclopaedias: the fifteen volumes of the Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1907–53) can still be consulted with profit in spite of their age; but they can now be supplemented with the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (‘Specialist Dictionary for Antiquity and Christianity’) (Stuttgart: Hieresmann, 1950– ), which is still in progress. For the history of the discipline, Frend (1996) provides a good survey; theworks of Rutgers (1995 and 2000) catacombs are unusually well informed by reflections on the history of Christian archaeology, while Elsner (2003) demonstrates how the categorization of evidence can often be (mis)informed by confessional concerns. Reed (2000), though dealing mainly end p.98

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved with matters related to the New Testament, provides an instructive guide to the problems of reading archaeological data in the light of paradigms derived from religious texts. A number of recent studies provide suggestive and instructive ways of reading the archaeological record for early Christianity. The first volume of White (1996–7) examines Christian architecture side by side with that of Mithraism and Judaism, but places excessive emphasis on the evolution of building types, while not paying enough attention to local contexts (see above, p. 93 ). The Christianization of urban space has attracted considerable attention. Wharton (1995) is an imaginative (and self-confessedly idiosyncratic) attempt to

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read the evidence in the light of literary texts and critical theory, but is not entirely reliable on details; for a more comprehensive treatment, Liebeschuetz (2001), whatever view one takes of his insistence on late antiquity as a period of ‘decline’, must be the starting point. The collections of essays edited by Burns and Eadie (2001), Christie and Loseby (1996), and Rich (1992) also contain many useful analyses of the archaeological evidence for Christianity and the late ancient city. By contrast, the place of Christianity in the countryside is still understudied. Tchalenko (1953–8) was a pioneering study of the villages on the limestone plateaux of Syria, but his conclusions have been revised by much recent work, such as the essays in King and Cameron (1994) and, with specific relevance to Christian archaeology, Kidner (2001); for comparative purposes, Bowes (2001) is suggestive on Christianity in rural Spain. As noted in my discussion, numerous excellent studies integrating the material and documentary evidence for individual sites and regions have appeared in recent years: these include cities and towns such as Aquileia in northern Italy (Sotinel 2005), Ephesus (Koester 1995), and Rusafa in Syria (Key Fowden 1999). Inevitably, Rome has attracted a great deal of attention: Curran (2000) provides a convenient synthesis for the fourth century; for the later period, a comprehensive survey of the data from recent excavations is provided by Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani (2004); on churches, Brandenburg (2006) is the most up-to-date survey, albeit one that prioritizes an essentially evolutionary model of ecclesiastical architectural development; among older works, Krautheimer (1980), if treated with caution, can be read with profit. There are too many regional surveys to list all of them here, but the following give some idea of the scope of archaeology to shed light on early Christianity in its local context: the second volume of Mitchell (1993) provides an incisive analysis of the rise of Christianity in Asia Minor that deftly synthesizes archaeological and documentary evidence; Kulikowski (2004) examines the impact of Christianity in Spain; Italy is well served with, for instance, Christie (2006: 73–192) surveying the whole region, and Campione (2000) reviewing southern Italian material; Parker (1999b) provides a comprehensive survey of archaeological material from Palestine, and gives an instructive example of how to view the development of Christianity in a broader context. The complexities of interpreting archaeological evidence for early Christianity are perhaps best appreciated by reading excavation reports: again, there are too many to list comprehensively, but Kraeling (1967) (on Dura Europos) and Fiema et al. (2001) (on the Petra basilica) give an idea of the processes involved. Finally, it should be noted that regular perusal of journals will yield much of value. For instance, a special issue of World Archaeology in 1987 was devoted to Christian archaeology and included useful surveys of excavations at Geneva (Bonnet 1987) and Carthage (Ennabli 1987). The Rivista di Archeologia cristiana is entirely devoted to the topic, albeit with a Roman focus; Near Eastern Archaeology (formerly Biblical Archaeology) often contains sumptuously illustrated articles on Christian archaeology in the Middle East. Many excavation reports appear first in local journals, among which Vetera Christianorum, edited at the University of Bari, provides unrivalled coverage of archaeological work on Jewish and Christian sites throughout southern Italy. end p.99

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Bibliography

BALDOVIN, J. F. (1987), The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development and Meaning of Stational Liturgy, OrChrAn 228 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum). BECKWITH, J. (1979), Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 2nd edn.

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(Harmondsworth: Penguin). BLAIR, J. (2005), The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press). BONNET, C. (1987), ‘The Archaeological Site of the Cathedral of Saint Peter (Saint-Pierre), Geneva’, World Archaeology, 18: 330–40. BOYARIN, D. (2004), Borderlines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). BOWERSOCK, G. W. (2006), Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).

BOWES, K. (2001), ‘“... Nec sedere in villam”: Villa Churches, Rural Piety and the Priscillianist Controversy’, in Burns and Eadie (2001), 323–48. BRANDENBURG, H. (2006), Ancient Churches of Rome from the Fourth to the Seventh Century, Bibliothèque de l'Antiquité Tardive, 8 (Turnhout: Brepols).

BROISE, H., DEWAILLY , M., and JOLIVET, V. (2000), ‘Horti Luculliani: un palazzo tardoantico a Villa Medici’, in S. Ensoli and E. La Rocca (eds.), Aurea Roma: Dalla città pagana alla città cristiana (Rome: L'Erma di Bretschneider), 113–15.

BURNS, T. S., and EADIE, J. W. (2001) (eds.), Urban Centres and Rural Contexts in Late Antiquity (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press).

CAILLET, J.-P. (1993), L'évergétisme monumental chrétien en Italie et à ses marges (Rome: École française de Rome). CAMPIONE, A. (2000), La Basilicata paleocristiana: diocesi e culti, Scavi e ricerche, 13 (Bari: Edipuglia). CECCHELLI, M. (2001), Materiali e techniche dell'edilizia paleocristiana a Roma, Materiali della cultura artistica, 4 (Rome: Edizioni De Luca). CHRISTIE, N. (2006), From Constantine to Charlemagne: An Archaeology of Italy, AD 300–800 (Aldershot: Ashgate). CHRISTIE, N., and LOSEBY , S. T. (1996) (eds.), Towns in Transition: Urban Evolution in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate). CLAUSS, M. (2000), The Roman Cult of Mithras (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). COOKSON, N. (1987), ‘The Christian Church in Roman Britain: A Synthesis of

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Archaeology’, World Archaeology, 18: 426–33. CROOK, J. (2000), The Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints in the Early Christian West, c.300–c.1200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). CURRAN, J. R. (2000), Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press). DEICHMANN, F. W. (1993), Archeologia Cristiana, Studia Archaeologica, 63 (Rome: L'Erma di Bretschneider). ELSNER, J. (2003), ‘Archaeologies and Agendas: Reflections on Late Ancient Jewish Art and Early Christian Art’, JRS 93: 114–28. ENNABLI, L. (1987), ‘Results of the International Save Carthage Campaign: The Christian Monuments’, World Archaeology, 18: 291–311. ESMONDE-CLEARY , A. S. (1989), The Ending of Roman Britain (London: Batsford; Savage, Md.: Barnes and Noble, 1990). end p.100

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved FIEMA, Z. T., KANELLOPOULOS, K., WALISZEWSKI, T., and SCHICK, R. (2001), The Petra Church, American Centre for Oriental Research Publications, 3 (Amman: American Center for Oriental Research). FILSON, F. V. (1939), ‘The Significance of the Early House Churches’, JBL 58: 105–12. FREND, W. H. C. (1996), The Archaeology of Early Christianity: A History (London: Geoffrey Chapman). FRÖSÉN, J., ARJAVA, A., and LEHTINEN, M. (2002), The Petra Papyri, American Centre for Oriental Research Publications, 4 (Amman: American Center for Oriental Research). GHILARDI, M. (2002), ‘Le catacombe di Roma tra la tarda antichità e l'alto medioevo’, Aug 42: 205–36. GRIG, L. (2004), Making Martyrs in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth).

HOPPE, L. J. (1994), The Synagogues and Churches of Ancient Palestine (Collegeville, Minn.: Michael Glazier). HUMPHRIES, M. (2007), ‘From Emperor to Pope? Ceremonial, Space, and Authority

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in Rome from Constantine to Gregory the Great’, in K. Cooper and J. Hillner (eds.), Dynasty, Patronage, and Authority in a Christian Capital: Rome, c. 350–850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 21–58. KEY FOWDEN, E. (1999), The Barbarian Plain: Saint Sergius Between Rome and Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press). KIDNER, F. L. (2001), ‘Christianizing the Syrian Countryside: An Archaeological and Architectural Approach’, in Burns and Eadie (2001), 349–79. KING, G. R. D., and CAMERON, Averil (1994) (eds.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, ii: Land Use and Settlement Patterns (Princeton: Darwin Press). KINNEY , D. (1972), ‘The Evidence for the Dating of S. Lorenzo in Milan’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 31: 92–107. KOCH, G. (1996), Early Christian Art and Architecture (London: SCM Press).

KOESTER, H. (1995) (ed.), Ephesos, Metropolis of Asia: An Interdisciplinary Approach to its Archaeology, Religion, and Culture (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International). KRAELING, C. H. (1967), The Christian Building (Excavations at Dura Europus, Final Report VIII, 2) (New Haven: Yale University Press). KRAUTHEIMER, R. (1980), Rome, Profile of a City 312–1308 (Princeton: Princeton University Press). —— (1986), Early Christian and Byzantine Arrchitecture, 4th edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin). KULIKOWSKI, M. (2004), Late Roman Spain and its Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). LEWIS, S. (1973), ‘San Lorenzo Revisited: A Theodosian Palace Church at Milan’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 32: 197–222. LIEBESCHUETZ, J. H. W. G. (2001), The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press). LOOSLEY , E. (2001), ‘The Early Christian bema Churches of Syria Revisited’, Antiquity, 75: 509–10. MACADAM, H. I. (1994), ‘Settlements and Settlement Patterns in Northern and Central Transjordania, ca 550–ca 750’, in King and Cameron (1994), 49–93. MCLYNN, N. B. (1994), Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press).

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MACHADO, C. (forthcoming), ‘Building the Past: Monuments and Memory in the Forum Romanum’, Late Antique Archaeology. end p.101

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved MAGNESS, J. (2005), ‘Ossuaries and the Burials of Jesus and James’, JBL 124: 121–54. —— (2007), ‘Has the Tomb of Jesus been Discovered?’, SBL Forum online , consulted June 2007. MARAZZI, F. (2000), ‘Rome in Transition: Economic and Political Change in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries’, in J. M. H. Smith (ed.), Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West: Essays in Honour of Donald A. Bullough (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 21–41. MARTIN, L. H. (1989), ‘Roman Mithraism and Christianity’, Numen, 36: 2–15.

MARUCCHI, O. (1929), The Evidence of the Catacombs for the Doctrines and Organisation of the Primitive Church (London: Sheed and Ward). MATHEWS, T. F. (1962), ‘An Early Roman Chancel Arrangement and its Liturgical Function’, Rivistà di Archeologia Cristiana, 38: 73–95. MAWER, C. F. (1995), Evidence for Christianity in Roman Britain: The Small Finds, BAR: British Series, 243 (Oxford: Tempus Reparatum). MENEGHINI, R., and SANTANGELI VALENZANI, R. (2004), Roma nell'Altomedioevo: topografia e urbanistica della città dal V al X secolo (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato). MENNINGA, C. (2004), ‘The Unique Church at Abila in the Decapolis’, Near Eastern Archaeology, 67: 40–9. MILBURN, R. (1988), Early Christian Art and Architecture (Aldershot: Scolar; Berkeley: University of California Press). MITCHELL, S. (1993), Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor, 2 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press). PARKER, S. T. (1999a), ‘Brief Notice on a Possible Early 4th-c. Church at Aqaba, Jordan’, JRA 12: 372–6. —— (1999b), ‘An Empire's New Holy Land: The Byzantine Period’, Near Eastern Archaeology, 62: 134–80. REED, J. L. (2000), Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity

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Press International). RICH, J. (1992) (ed.), The City in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge).

RUTGERS, L. V. (1995), The Jews of Late Ancient Rome: Evidence for Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora (Leiden: E. J. Brill). —— (2000), Subterranean Rome: In Search of the Roots of Christianity in the Catacombs of the Eternal City (Leuven: Peeters). SAUER, E. (1996), The End of Paganism in the North-Western Provinces of the Roman Empire: The Example of the Mithras Cult, BAR: International Series, 634, (Oxford: Tempus Reparatum). SCHAM, S. (2003), ‘The Archaeology of the “The Passion”,’, Near Eastern Archaeology, 66: 143. SNYDER, G. F. (2003), Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before Constantine, 2nd edn. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press). SOTINEL, C. (2005), Identité civique et christianisme: Aquile du IVe au VIe siècle (Rome: École française de Rome). STEMBERGER, G. (2000), Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark). STRINGER, M. (2005), A Sociological History of Christian Worship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). TCHALENKO, G. (1953–8), Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord: le massif du Bélus à l'époque romaine, 3 vols. (Paris: P. Geunther). end p.102

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved THOMAS, C. (1981), Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500 (London: Batsford; Berkeley: University of California Press). TOYNBEE, J., and WARD-PERKINS, J. (1956), The Shrine of St Peter and the Vatican Excavations (London: Longmans, Green, and Co). WARD-PERKINS, B. (1984), From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Urban Public Building in Northern and Central Italy AD 300–850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). —— (1998), ‘The cities’, in Averil Cameron and P. Garnsey (eds.), The Cambridge

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Ancient History, xiii: The Late Empire AD 337–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 371–410. WHARTON, A. J. (1995), Refiguring the Post Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

WHITE, L. M. (1996–7), The Social Origins of Christian Architecture, 2 vols. (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International). XYDIS, S. G. (1949), ‘The Chancel Barrier, Solea, and Ambo of Hagia Sophia’, Art Bulletin, 29: 1–24. end p.103

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [104]-[119]

5 Material Evidence (2): Visual Culture Robin M. Jensen Abstract: Introduction: Definitions and Methodological Considerations – Evidence and Issues Pertaining to the Nature of the Data Keywords: Christ, Culture, Christian

5.1 Introduction: Definitions and Methodological Considerations LIKE other students of culture, historians of ancient Christianity deem the visual art, artefacts, and architecture of the early church as resources indispensable to discerning how various early Christian communities expressed and transmitted their religious beliefs. Far more than mere illustration of the ideas or teachings articulated in surviving written documents, visual and material artefacts add depth and perspective to the analysis of a particular Christian group. The study of visual images, moreover, not only supplements and balances documentary research, but often affords scholars access to objects of great beauty as well as powerful agents of message and meaning. Furthermore, it opens the question of how vision itself functioned in religious practice. For this reason, material evidence should not be subordinated to the study of texts, but regarded as an invaluable and independent source of historical data. The insights gained from the study of visual culture are achieved not only from comparing textual evidence with material evidence, but also from the appreciation of the interpretive role, expressive power, and aesthetic qualities of physical remains in their own right, along with the analysis of the end p.104

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved visual experience itself (both production and reception) as a meaningconstructive activity. The term ‘visual culture’ encompasses images and artefacts produced by artists or artisans that reflect aspects of civilization which may or may not be evident in other cultural artefacts such as written documents. In its broadest sense, a study of early Christian visual culture considers all kinds of human-made material remains, including everyday objects (e.g. decorated lamps, bowls, coins, etc.), as well as those products that we locate within the designation ‘fine arts’ (e.g. sculpture, painting, and mosaic). It also includes the study of the built spaces (architecture) that not only housed these artefacts but also reflect the patterns and values of daily life, religious practices, and special ceremonies (e.g. domestic, ecclesial, and funerary structures). Those objects most likely to be the focus of historians of Christianity are those with obvious religious associations, as evident in their content (iconography), context (religious settings), or function (ritual

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use). Despite the almost undisputed value accorded to the study of visual culture, historians of early Christianity often confront certain obstacles that make them reluctant to engage such data. First, the traditional text-focused training leaves many unprepared to evaluate artefacts or art objects with any confidence. Lacking expertise, they must rely upon the analyses of scholars trained in the fields of art history and archaeology. Such reliance sometimes leads to fruitful collaboration, but may also be compromised by the divergent methods, questions, or priorities of these different academic fields. On the other hand, careful and conscious integration of these different perspectives can result in useful insights about the evidence itself and inhibit inclinations either simply to equate texts and artefacts or to interpret the one through the other. At the same time, text scholars may profitably bring documentary evidence to the table, helping to foster inclusive and integrated historical research with added dimension and texture. Generally, the first step in the study of visual culture is the attentive observation, careful description, provisional identification, and preliminary classification of the artefacts or objects under consideration. This includes efforts to date and establish provenance, as well as to note material, stylistic details or potential models. But the study of visual culture goes many steps beyond describing and classifying or categorizing evidence. Assessing the appearance and geographical placement of an object, including its specific imagery, inscriptions, fabrication, apparent function, condition, and physical context is essential, but not sufficient or conclusive. The scholar of visual culture uses this arguably factual material to begin to theorize about the object's role in transmitting certain socio-religious convictions, ideas, or values, but also sees it in the context of and relationship to other cultural artefacts or products, including written documents. Finally, the analyst may ask how the object might have been regarded in the act of seeing and the nature of the relationship between subject (viewer/maker) and object (artefact/product). end p.105

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Texts, however, are to be used not as definitive guides to establishing the meaning or function of an object, but rather as parallel forms of communication and comparable modes of interpretation. Incorporating available and relevant documentary evidence into the analysis of visual data produces a synthetic approach that not only identifies common motifs, concepts, or preoccupations, but also notes contradictions or discontinuity between material and textual artefacts. So long as neither form of evidence is automatically privileged, such a dialectical approach is mutually illuminating. One does not interpret the other, but both are understood as works of interpretation in their own terms. At the same time, they are not altogether independent and unrelated. The study of visual culture has much in common with the discipline of art history, but is also distinct from it in significant respects. In the past, art historians were often concerned principally with formal stylistic and technical analyses of artworks and in establishing their dates, origins, and influences. The art object was appreciated for its aesthetic qualities as well as its place in the evolution of a style. Art historians also studied the cultural and historical context of a work—as well as its placement within a particular artist's (or movement's) Œoeuvre or trajectory—although these issues were not always their sole preoccupation. In the past century, however, the field of art history has directed much attention to the problem of interpretation—in discerning what objects signified to their makers or viewers—or even to modern scholars themselves. Newer studies have considered the significance of narrative themes or symbolic motifs, and have

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evaluated the ways in which an object's appearance projects its message or reveals its function—in other words, finding meaning in external form. By contrast, scholars of visual culture typically expend less energy on extensive formal or stylistic analysis of those objects under examination and concentrate on assessing their significance and function within their social, conceptual, and religious context. They also choose to consider evidence that would not be widely regarded as ‘fine art’. They are also more interested in the study of visualization itself, as an activity that constructs meaning and affects the nature of perception as well as representation. In other words, these researchers share many of preoccupations of art historians, but not all of them, or to the same degree—and they also examine a wider array of objects. Additionally, they tend to place the art object into a larger frame that includes other cultural artefacts, especially documentary evidence, and draw upon the work of social historians, intellectual historians, ritual theorists, and anthropologists, as well as art historians. Because they view material evidence as an expression and means of transmission of particular socially constructed ideas or values, students of visual culture are less interested in or even appreciative of their aesthetic values (or lack thereof). In other words, these artefacts are valued more for their communicative function than for their intrinsic beauty or value. In this respect, they are not ends in themselves, but means toward a different goal. The differences between the two fields are not always so easy to grasp, however, end p.106

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved partly because the field of art history has become more diverse in its theory and methodology in the past half century, and partly because the study of visual culture, to a great degree, emerged out of this ‘sibling field’.

5.1.1 Brief Overview of the History of the Field Several foundational thinkers profoundly influenced the development of the study of visual culture. Among them, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) is generally regarded as the founder of the study of iconography in the early part of the twentieth century. In his influential (retrospective) volume of essays, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (1955), Panofsky defined not only the field but also its methodology. He considered iconography as that branch of art history particularly concerned with subject matter or meaning, in contrast to form—with images more than with discrete works of art. Panofsky's method required the incorporation of supplementary evidence as illuminatory and essential for understanding the images within their specific contexts. His method drew upon theological treatises, poetry, philosophy, histories, and other cultural artefacts, in order to arrive at synthetic hypotheses to contextualize and synthetically interpret the meaning of certain images. For Panofsky, a work of art pointed far beyond itself as it participated in or reflected upon a civilization's foundational symbols. Panofsky, however, was interested not only in a synthetic and culturally sensitive interpretation of images, but also in the transmission of meaning within a single culture, and from one time and place to another. He referred to this kind of discursive interpretation as ‘iconology’, rather than ‘iconography’, since it was far more than the mere decoding of a visual language. In his view, all aspects of a visual image, including its basic design elements (colour, pattern, shape, etc.), its content (imagery), its religious significance (secular or sacred), and its aesthetic perception (beautiful, ugly) are culturally mediated qualities or perceptions. Viewers—whether ancient or modern—are likewise thoroughly influenced by their cultural or social locations. Thus, for Panofsky, the work of interpretation was as

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much influenced by the mindset of the interpreter as it drew upon congruent data. This means, of course, that interpretations vary from viewer to viewer, and that visual evidence has no single, established meaning. Panofsky's work, although not aimed specifically at early Christian art or visual culture in general, influenced many who followed him, including Emile M#x00E2;le (1862–1954), Charles Rufus Morey (1877–1955), and Otto von Simson (1912–), all of whom studied Christian art within its broader liturgical, theological, social, and political contexts. Morey (who founded the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University in 1917) was interested less in the cultural or social implications of Christian art and more in establishing a way of classifying different objects according to their end p.107

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved iconographic themes. Within this structure, however, Morey also attended to variations in the ways in which the same subjects were depicted. A similar, but distinct, taxonomic effort was undertaken by the Dutch scholar Henri van de Waal (1919–72), who developed the now universally used system known as Iconclass, which categorizes images almost entirely according to subject-matter, with far less attention to their compositional distinctions. Although Panofsky is usually credited as the founder of the field, his mentor, Aby Warburg (1866–1929), had actually pioneered the study of iconology in Europe, calling for the examination of art objects as part of a larger social milieu and with reference to other cultural products. Warburg in turn influenced important thinkers in Germany, including Fritz Saxl (1890–1948), who founded the Warburg Institute in 1921. Saxl was interested in the intersections of the history of art and religion and emphasized the continuity between Christian and Graeco-Roman art. This idea was embraced by many German scholars, including Franz Joseph Dölger (1879–1940), who criticized earlier art historians as being too narrowly dogmatic or Christian in their orientation. Many of those earlier scholars worked under the auspices of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, and were actually the principal investigators of early Christian painting and sculpture in Rome: Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822–94), Raffaele Garucci (1812–85), Giuseppe Marchi (1795–1860), and Josef Wilpert (1857–1944). Against their supposed Christian or doctrinal bias, the German school claimed interpretive strategies that were more objective and scientific, drawing upon methodologies developed by the social sciences and the history of religions schools as these were framed in the mid-twentieth century. They also promoted their view of Christian art as being more contextualized and attentive to the distinctions between official and popular religion. Perhaps the most widely known student of early Christian iconography, however, was André Grabar (1896–1990), whose influence on the field has been unmatched. Taking up the cause of integrating the study of culture, politics, and theology in the analysis of early Christian visual art, Grabar believed that images constituted a special type of language. He claimed to be uninterested in creating a manual of Christian images that would classify them according to their themes or attend to their nuances of style, provenance, or workshop. Instead, Grabar approached the study of Christian iconography with two overriding questions: why early Christian images looked the way they did, and what religious purpose they served (Grabar 1968: p. xli). Grabar's key work, Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins, attended particularly to the political and theological contexts of the objects he examined and saw them both as representing theological ideas and as implicitly political. Like many of his contemporaries who rejected the notion that Christian art could have arisen de novo, Grabar regarded Christian art as originating in Roman

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secular and religious iconography, first assimilating, then adapting and extending, end p.108

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved its visual vocabulary. At the same time, he posited the emergence of Jewish art as prior to and influential on Christian art, asserting that it was more iconographically evolved. The intersection of culture and art resulted in a transformation of Christian imagery in the fourth century, according to Grabar, as scenes of military victory or posthumous apotheosis were reformed into an iconography that expressed the dynamism (and political character) of the triumphant Church. Thus art both served and transmitted the ideology or agenda of the Empire as much as the contents of the faith. In general, the scholarship of the twentieth century sought to place early Christian visual culture in the context of a larger political, social, and religious milieu. Some scholars retained an affinity for formal, stylistic analysis, among them Ernst Kitzinger (1912–2003), who also extended the range of ‘early Christian’ to include monuments from the Byzantine world. In the meantime, some important reference works appeared, including the monumental, multivolumed Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, edited by Fernand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq (1907–53), which provided a non-methodologically driven treasure trove to students interested in the intersections of liturgy, architecture, and visual art. In mid-century the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum appeared, edited by Theodor Klauser in collaboration with scholars from the ‘German School’, Franz Joseph Dölger, Hans Lietzmann, and Ernst Dassman (1950– ). This was followed by more iconographically and thematically focused reference works, including Louis Réau's Iconographie de l'art chrétien; Engelbert Kirschbaum's, Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, and the two-volume Iconography of Christian Art, by Gertrude Schiller (translated from the German edition of 1969).

5.1.2 More Recent Trends The emphasis on continuity between Graeco-Roman and Christian visual culture continued to be pressed in scholarship toward the end of the twentieth century. The exhibition titled ‘The Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century’, held at the Metropolitan Museum in 1977–8, produced an extensive catalogue edited by Kurt Weitzmann that identified the categories of monuments according to their ‘realms’ (imperial, classical, secular, Jewish, Christian), and further broke down the entries according to their content (portraits, scenic representations, mythological figures, architecture). The extensive range of objects, as well its significant contributors (including Herbert Kessler, James Breckenridge, Richard Brilliant, and Erich Dinkler), made the catalogue for that exhibition a landmark publication. This catalogue's Christian section also classed artworks as having abbreviated, narrative, or iconic compositions, despite considerable overlap in their visual content. Such categorization implies evolution in the composition of Christian art, as well as allowing for discussion of the end p.109

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developed in an accompanying symposium volume with articles by Peter Brown, Beat Brenk, Massey Shepherd, Richard Krautheimer, George M. A. Hanfmann, and Ernst Kitzinger on the intersections of art, culture, and religion in late antiquity. Along with the question of cultural continuity, some scholars of the late twentieth century began to challenge the view that art necessarily reflects the ideology or values of the social elite, and emphasized the social function of images across a wider cultural spectrum as a means to overcome the ‘invisibility’ of the non-literate classes. In the 1980s and 1990s several studies appeared that revisited the questions and conclusions drawn by the earlier generations, and which also exemplify these different interpretive trajectories. In the mid-1980s Graydon Snyder published his first edition of Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before Constantine. In an effort to identify a particular quality that distinguished post-Constantinian Christian remains from those of the period ante pacem, Snyder took the side of the German school (e.g. Dölger, Klauser, and Dinkler), whom he refers to as ‘contextualists’, and criticized the work of the old ‘Roman school’ (along with some of its later representatives—Aldo Nestori, Orazio Marucchi, Margherita Guarducci, Antonio Ferrua, and Fabrizio Bisconti) for taking a particularly Catholic confessional and apologetic approach to the material and reading later theological or doctrinal developments back into much earlier evidence. Snyder was much influenced by contemporary scholars studying the socio-cultural matrix of the emergent Church (e.g. Gerd Theissen and Wayne Meeks), when he argued that early Christian art should be viewed as especially representative of a house-church community of disenfranchised and egalitarian Christians who eschewed images of sacrifice and instead represented Christ as social and personal deliverer (Snyder 1985: 165–6). In the early 1990s, Thomas Mathews's The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (1993) offered a different critique of earlier scholarship, as Mathews disparaged the tendency to subsume early Christian art into the category of ‘Late Antique’ and to view Christian art as inferior or aberrant—a factor in the general ‘decline of Roman art’ (Mathews 1993: 11–12). He also attacked the theory espoused by Grabar and others that Christian art after Constantine was infused with imperial motifs, even modelling images of Christ himself after portrayals of the Emperor. Mathews argued that this more or less unchallenged theory (‘The Emperor Mystique’) arose from personal ideological agendas of its principle instigators (Ernst Kantorowicz, Andreas Alföldi, and Grabar), who nurtured a nostalgic longing for lost empires in the years between the two World Wars. He also noted that scholars who held a less positive view of imperialism still clung to the characterization of post-Constantinian art as its visual prop (e.g. von Simson and Karl Lehmann-Hartleben). Identifying the ‘Emperor Mystique’ as ‘the real problem facing the study of Early Christian art’, Mathews proposed instead to see the artistic representation of the triumph of Christianity as not the manipulation of religion end p.110

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved by a winning political party, but rather the iconographic record of Christ's victory in a ‘clash of gods’. Thus, rather than being modelled on an enthroned emperor, the image of Christ in his glory was drawn from depictions of a regnant Jupiter (Mathews 1993: 21). Finally, such late twentieth-century philosophical movements as semiotics, postmodern literary criticism, and reader response theory have influenced the way in which students of visual culture interpret their data. These approaches undermine all claims to interpretive certitude or established conclusions and challenge the choices which historians make about the objects for their study.

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Moreover, because it is presumably impossible to establish a single correct answer, instead of asking ‘what’ an image signifies, scholars have become more interested in ‘how’ it communicates. In this case the study of visual culture becomes more focused on the way that images shape reality in a dialectical relationship with viewers, rather than viewing them as bits of historical data that almost accidentally reflect reality. Thus the field has moved from attention to iconography as a part of intellectual history toward more critical social and ideological analysis. At the same time, it called for attention to objects or cultural products that were often overlooked. Semiotic theorists, in particular, assert that all textual and material artefacts (visual culture) function as a semantic system, consisting of signs and symbols that are dynamic and multifaceted. No particular group of objects or single interpretation is sufficient or representative, as it represents only one of a myriad of viewpoints. One important example of this type of scholarship is Tonio Hölscher's 1987 work, translated into English as The Language of Images in Roman Art (2004). Another important contributor to the discussion about the subjective nature of selecting and interpreting ancient objects and monuments is Annabelle Wharton, who not only incorporated a close study of texts into her study of archaeological remains but also addressed the gap between historical artefact and a contemporary viewer by recognizing the unavoidable presumptions and biases of any individual, modern analysis. Her 1995 book, Refiguring the Post-Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna, not only examines these spaces in light of relevant documents, but also draws upon comparable encounters with buildings of the present era. A foreword to Hölscher's above-mentioned work was written by Jas Elsner, himself one of the most important contemporary theorists of visual culture. Like many of his predecessors, Elsner contextualizes early Christian art, regarding it as a subcategory of Roman visual culture generally. In two books published in the late 1990s, Art and the Roman Viewer (1995) and Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph (1998), Elsner avoids making clear distinctions between Roman and Christian material remains. Nevertheless, he also tracks the changes wrought by the advent of Christianity. He argues that even though Christian iconography was rooted in both the secular and religious imagery of Graeco-Roman culture, it was able to adapt it and infuse it with new religious content. In other words, it did not break with end p.111

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved the past, but rather transformed or redefined it (Elser 1998: 3). Thus Christian art remains Roman art—with biblical characters dressed in Roman garb and inhabiting a Roman social world. Against Mathews, therefore, Elsner deems the iconographic developments of the fourth century as exemplifying this cultural and religious evolution, rather than as the visual expression of religious competition. Imperial iconography after the time of Constantine was not intended to make Christ into the Emperor (or vice versa), but to put ‘iconic stress on the emperor's office and its relationship to the economy of earth and heaven’ (Elsner 1995: 189). Finally, out of his emphasis on continuity with Roman culture, Elsner favours classical literature as his textual backdrop and pays scant attention to early Christian literature (theological treatises or biblical commentaries) or liturgical texts. At the same time, Elsner considers small objects as well as large monuments for the ways in which they create, reflect, and transmit a religious worldview; the way that image and space together construct a socio-political topography. These various theories and approaches to the incorporation of visual evidence into the study of the history of Christianity inevitably raise the problem of scholarly objectivity or detachment. Although analysis of any type of data is undoubtedly influenced by the intellectual, political, or even theological biases

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and preconceptions of the interpreter, the study of Christian artefacts presents a challenge to researchers accustomed to examining written documents. In large part the consequence of academic training and general familiarity, images seem more ambiguous than words, and thus vulnerable to being manipulated to serve different scholarly or theological agendas. For example, while some scholars might assume early Christian art to reflect mainstream or orthodox practices and teachings, others argue that it demonstrates a diversity of theological views and attitudes toward authority, or it represents only a particular segment of the Christian populace. Some scholars see an evolution and separation of Christian art out of its Roman milieu; others emphasize its cultural continuity and regard it as a subcategory of Roman art—far from unambiguously Christian in its meaning. Where some historians see a progressive march toward uniformity, others find continuing evidence of religious syncretism and the survival of ‘popular religion’ versus ‘official’ forms of Christianity. Some scholars posit a class distinction between people who read books and those who looked at images, while others note that art was often produced for a society's elite or materially secure members. Drawing upon disciplinary specialities and expertise, some interpreters will consider visual culture in light of social history, others in terms of intellectual movements, still others in the context of religious practices. Depending on where they stand on these issues, some historians (including this author) will turn to contemporary Christian documents for illumination, seeing early Christian art as a related form of theological or scriptural exposition, while others will draw more from the broader themes of late classical (religious and secular) literature. end p.112

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5.2 Evidence and Issues Pertaining to the Nature of the Data As demonstrated above, early Christian visual culture has been studied, sorted, and interpreted in many different ways, depending on the examiner's purposes, questions, intentions, or assumptions. Some scholars are most interested in coming up with a reasonable chronology, and perhaps look for key influences and an evolution of style. They may be interested in the ways in which different workshops in different parts of the Roman Empire constructed their images, or perhaps in the commonalities among these different workshops. Other scholars are less interested in the formal aspects of the art and more intent on discerning the way in which the art communicates aspects or tenets of a system of belief or values. Different scholars have different ways of approaching the material, all of them mediated by their academic training, different purposes or goals, and even their personal, religious, or scholarly biases. Some will be more likely to assert the provisional nature of their conclusions, others more concerned with forging an interdisciplinary methodology. These differences are critically important in the selection as well as the analysis of evidence. However, whatever the goals, methods, or assumptions of the researcher or scholar, certain limitations of the evidence apply to them all. The first of these limitations is chronological. Little evidence of what we might call recognizably Christian art can be dated prior to the third century. Such art can be identified as Christian primarily by its content rather than its context, since very little of it comes from specifically Christian settings. Its iconography is, then, the means by which it is identified as ‘Christian’ it includes symbols commonly found next to Christian inscriptions and known to have Christian significance (e.g. dove, boat, shepherd) or scenes based upon biblical narratives (e.g. Noah, Jonah, the three youths in the fiery furnace). Prior to the late second or early third century, either Christians produced no distinguishable art of their own, or what they produced has been lost. Although either option is possible, the likelihood that early Christians created no new iconography but rather saw Christian significance in

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widely popular decorative floral, bucolic, or maritime motifs is supported by textual references to the form of the cross as apparent in the world, Christian interpretations of common figures (boat, vineyard), or the appropriate symbol for a Christian signet ring (dove, fish, ship, lyre, anchor).1 Certain other standard types (praying figure, seated philosopher reading from a scroll) may have taken on a specific Christian meaning (Christianity as true wisdom, for example).2 Nevertheless, the relative lateness of distinctively Christian art has led many historians to conclude that first- and second-century Christians were aniconic or even iconophobic—due either to the influence of Jewish injunctions against figurative end p.113

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved visual images or to universal Christian adherence to the second commandment. Such a conclusion thus implies a separation from Judaism in the third century or, alternatively, a loss of distinctively Christian identity and values as the religion began to become assimilated into Graeco-Roman culture at that time. Within the last 30 years, however, partly due to the work of Mary Charles Murray and Paul Corby Finney, historians have tended to view the emergence of Christian art as the result of a gradual evolution, rather than a change in practice, theology, or culture. In the meantime, discoveries such as the synagogue at Dura Europos also demolished the perception that Judaism itself was universally aniconic. A second limitation of the earlier evidence is its context. The majority of the earliest available remains come not from churches or specifically Christian settings but from funereal contexts which were not exclusively Christian. These artefacts—paintings on the walls of the Roman catacombs and carvings on sarcophagi—survived in large measure because they were underground, and thus not subject to the vicissitudes of urban renewal or the destruction of war. Even those terra cotta lamps, manufactured for domestic use, were largely discovered in tombs. However, the fact that so much of early Christian visual culture comes from a sepulchral setting bears consideration in their interpretation. Very little comparable material evidence can be accessed before the early fourth century, apart from such exceptional monuments as the Dura Europos house church. Along with this limited setting for early Christian remains is their provenance. Most of the first and most significant examples come from Rome and its environs, again with certain possible exceptions such as a late third-century sarcophagus from Gaul. A final characteristic of the earliest remains is that for the most part they consist of wall paintings in tombs, inscriptions and carved images on burial plaques, or relief carvings on sarcophagi. A few mosaics again are the exception, one famous example discovered beneath St Peter's basilica in Rome showing Christ in the guise of Sol or Apollo and dating to the turn of the fourth century. The repertoire of images found on these early Christian monuments is fairly limited. The oldest group includes those decorative or symbolic motifs described above (birds, garlands, the shepherd, orante, banquet scene) as well as abbreviated references to particular biblical narrative scenes. Stock representations of Adam and Eve, Noah in his ark, Jonah being cast overboard and thrown back up on dry land, Abraham offering Isaac, Moses striking the rock in the wilderness, Daniel with his lions, and the three youths in the fiery furnace show some variations, but share enough standardizing characteristics to make them easily identifiable. Scenes from the Christian New Testament, including the adoration of the magi and of Jesus healing or working wonders also appear after the middle of the third century. The repetition (popularity), variability, and evolution over time of these images are significant factors in their interpretation. The frequency of motifs based upon stories in the Hebrew scriptures led many

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scholars to posit a Jewish source for early Christian art. Beginning with Joseph end p.114

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Stzygowsky (1923) in the early twentieth century, and continuing with C. R. Morey (1942) and Pierre du Bourguet (1971), some historians concluded that early Christian biblical images must have been derived from Jewish prototypes. Perhaps most influential was Kurt Weitzmann's hypothesis that a lost Jewish prototype—perhaps an illustrated Septuagint produced by a Hellenistic Jewish community—provided many of the models for early Christian iconography (1990). Among the critics of this position was Joseph Gutmann (1971), who also rejected the idea that Jews in late antiquity could be so clearly distinguished into normative and non-normative communities. Beginning in the mid-fourth century, this situation changed considerably. The identification of Christian visual culture was no longer based solely on its content, but was also denoted by its context. The building programme of Constantine was a signal beginning to the monumental shift in the amount and variety, as well as the quality and scale, of the material remains. Pilgrimage shrines and cemetery churches were constructed and decorated with figurative mosaic programmes along their nave walls and in their apses. Illuminated manuscripts of the scriptures began to be produced. Precious metal and ivory objects were manufactured for ritual use, to adorn churches, or for private devotion. Gemstones and amulets were incised with Christian symbols and inscriptions. Smaller, more commonplace objects also appear, and constitute a special category of Christian visual culture. Pilgrimage tokens were mass-produced as souvenirs. Ceramic bowls, lamps, tiles, glassware, and textiles were fabricated for domestic or personal use. Along with this extensive shift in the type, quality, and quantity of Christian visual culture beginning in the Constantinian era was a change in its content. By the middle of the fourth century most of the popular motifs of earlier generations began to disappear from both catacomb painting and sarcophagus reliefs. Jonah and Noah almost completely vanish. Meanwhile, a new repertoire of images, including Moses receiving the Law, the crossing of the Red Sea, and portraits of the saints, apostles, the Virgin Mary, and Christ emerge to take their place. Images of Jesus enthroned or ascendant giving the new law to Peter and Paul appear along with the earliest visual depictions of scenes from the passion and crucifixion. Biblical narrative images continued, but were now moved on to the nave walls of churches or appeared on the pages of illustrated Bibles. Funeral monuments, by contrast, tended to be adorned with more symbolic and stylized depictions of peacocks, sheep, twining vines, chalices, doves, and christograms. How historians view these changes in the context, content, style, and scale of Christian material evidence from the third through the sixth centuries will generally vary according to whether they see it as the Christianization of Roman culture, the Romanization (or imperialization) of the Christian religion, or the final consolidation of something essentially and distinctively Christian, no matter how much influenced by Roman or even Jewish prototypes and parallels. These different end p.115

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best understood as rooted in and related to its Roman past or as an innovation arising out of and responding to the values and teachings of a new religious movement will not be easily resolved. The most useful conclusion probably incorporates both of those perspectives and sees visual culture as dynamically preserving the old and cautiously inventing the new; interlacing the past with the present in almost constantly varying and subtle proportions. Notes 1.

Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 55. 3–8; Dial. 86. 6; Hippolytus of Rome, Antichr. 59; Ben. Iacob. 25; Clement of Alexandria, Paed. 3. 11. 2. See Tertullian, Nat. 1. 4; Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 5. 44, 46; 2 Apol. 10, 13; Clement of Alexandria, Prot. 6. 11; Strom. 1. 28. 3. Suggested Reading Some of the most significant recent studies of Christian iconography are mentioned in the essay and reference list, including Finney (1994), Elsner (1998), Mathews (1999), and Snyder (2003). Other important summaries and ground-breaking theoretical works from the past three to four decades include the following:

BELTING, H. (1994), Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). BRENK, B., and BRANDENBURG, H. (1977), Späntike und frühes Christentum (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen-Verlag). CARTLIDGE, D. R., and ELLIOTT, J. K. (2001), Art and the Christian Apocrypha (London: Routledge). JENSEN, R. (2000), Understanding Early Christian Art (London: Routledge).

—— (2005), Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). KOCH, G. (2003), Early Christian Art and Architecture (London: SCM Press).

LOWDEN, J. (1997), Early Christian and Byzantine Art (London: Phaidon).

MILBURN, R. (1988), Early Christian Art and Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press). MILES, M. (1985), Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston: Beacon Press). SPIER, J. (2007), Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press). TRONZO, W. (1986), The Via Latina Catacomb (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press).

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end p.116

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Principle resources or tools for research mentioned in the above essay and reference list include the Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (Cabrol and Leclercq 1924–53); Iconographie de l'art chrétien (Réau 1955–9); Iconography of Christian Art (Schiller 1971–2); Lexikon der Christlichen Iconographie (Kirschbaum, 1968–76); and the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (Klauser et al. 1968–76). To these the following important collections should be added:

BISCONTI, F. (2000), (ed.), Temi di iconografia paleocristiana (Vatican City: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana). DEICHMANN, F. W. (1967–2003), Repertorium der christlich-antiken Sarkophage, 3 vols. (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner). KRAUTHEIMER, R. et al. (1937–), Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae: The Early Christian Basilicas of Rome (Vatican City: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana). Major works by authors cited in the essay are included in the Bibliography below. Bibliography

ALFÖLDI, A. (1970), Die monarchisch Repräsentation im römischen Kaiserreiche (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchges). BISCONTI, F., with NICOLAI, V., and MAZZOLENI, D. (2002), The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, Inscriptions, trans. C. C. Stella and L. Touchette (Regensberg: Verlag Schnell and Steiner GmbH). BRENK, B. (1980), ‘The Imperial Heritage of Early Christian Art’, in K. Weitzmann (1980), 39–52. BRECKRENRIDGE, J. (1979), ‘The Imperial Realm: Portraiture’, in K. Weitzmann (1979), 2–7. BRILLIANT, R. (1979), ‘The Classical Realm: Mythology’, in K. Weitzmann (1979), 126–31. BROWN, P. (1980), ‘Art and Society in Late Antiquity’, in K. Weitzmann (1980), 17–27. CABROL, F., and LECLERCQ, H. (1907–53), Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (Paris: Letouzey et Ané). DASSMAN, E. (1973), Sündenvergebung durch Taufe, Busse und Martyrerfürbitte in den Zeugnissen früchristlicher Frömmigkeit und Kunst (Münster: Verlag Aschendorff). —— (1982), Paulus in früchristlicher Frömmigkeit und Kunst (Opladen:

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Westdeutscher Verlag). DINKLER, E. (1964), Das Apsismosaik von S. Apollinare in Classe (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag). —— (1979), ‘The Christian Realm: Abbreviated Representations’, in K. Weitzmann (1979), 396–403. DÖLGER, F. J. (1943),

C [Ichthys]: Das Fisch-symbol in der früchristlicher Zeit

(Münster in Westfalen: Aschendorff). DU BOURGUET, P. (1971),Early Christian Art, trans. T. Burton (New York: Reynal).

ELSNER, J. (1995), Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

—— (1998), Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire A.D. 100–450 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). end p.117

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved FERRUA, A. (1960), Le pitture della nuova catacomba di Via Latina (Vatican City: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana). —— (1990), The Unknown Catacomb: A Unique Discovery of Early Christian Art, trans. I. Inglis (New Lanark, Scotland: Geddes and Grosset Ltd.). FINNEY , P. C. (1994), The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (New York: Oxford University Press). GARUCCI, R. (1873–81), Storia dell'arte cristiana nei primi otto secoli della Chiesa (Prato: Gaetano Guasti). GRABAR, A. (1968), Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins, trans. T. Grabar (Princeton: Princeton University Press). —— (1969), Early Christian Art: From the Rise of Christianity to the Death of Theodosius, trans. S. Gilbert and J. Emmons (New York: Odyssey Press).

GUARDUCCI, M. (1963), The Tradition of Peter in the Vatican: In the Light of History and Archaeology (Vatican City: Vatican Polyglot Press). GUTMANN, J. (1971) (ed.), No Graven Images: Studies in Art and the Hebrew Bible (New York: KTAV).

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HANFMANN, G. M. A. (1980), ‘The Continuity of Classical Art: Culture, Myth, and Faith’, in K. Weitzmann (1980), 75–99. HÖLSCHER, T. (2004), The Language of Images in Roman Art, trans. A. Snodgrass and A.-M. Künzl-Snodgrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

KANTOROWICZ, E. (1957), The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press). —— (1965), Selected Studies (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin). KESSLER, H. L. (1979), ‘The Christian Realm: Narrative Representations’, in K. Weitzmann (1979), 39–52. KIRSCHBAUM, E. (1968–76), Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie (Rome: Herder).

KITZINGER, E. (1980a), Byzantine Art in the Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). —— (1980b), ‘Christian Imagery: Growth and Impact’, in K. Weitzmann (1980), 141–63. Klauser, T., with Dassman, E., Dölger, F.-J., and Lietzmann, H. (1950–), Reallexikon für Antiké und Christentum: Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit der antiken Welt (Stuttgart: Hiersemann). KRAUTHEIMER, R. (1980), ‘Success and Failure in Late Antique Church Planning’, in K. Weitzmann (1980), 121–39. LIETZMANN, H. (1927), Petrus und Paulus in Rom: liturgische und archaeologische Studien, 2nd edn. (Berlin: de Gruyter). MÂLE, E. (1960), The Early Churches of Rome, trans. D. Buxton (London: E. Benn). MARCHI, G. (1844), Monumenti delle arti cristiane primitive nella metropoli del cristianesimo (Rome: Tip. di C. Puccinelli). MARUCCHI, O. (1932), Le catacombe romane (Rome: La Libreria dello stato).

—— (1935), Manual of Christian archaeology, trans. Hubert Vecchierello (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press). MATHEWS, T. (1993), The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press; rev. edn. 1999). MEEKS, W. (1983), The First Urban Christians (New Haven: Yale University Press).

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MOREY , C. R. (1942), Early Christian Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

MURRAY , Sr M. C. (1977), ‘Art and the Early Church’, JTS

NS

28/2: 304–5.

end p.118

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved —— (1981), Rebirth and Afterlife: A Study of the Transmutation of Some Pagan Imagery in Early Christian Art, BAR International Series, 100 (Oxford: BAR).

PANOFSKY , E. (1955), Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday). RÉAU, L. (1955–9), Iconographie de l'art chrétien (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ROSSI, G. de (1864–77), La Roma sotterranea (Rome: Cromo-litografia pontificia). Saxl, F. (1957), Lectures, 2 vols. (London: University of London, Warburg Institute). SCHILLER, G. (1971–2), Iconography of Christian Art, trans. J. Seligman (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society). SHEPHERD, M. H. (1980), ‘Christology: A Central Problem of Early Christian Theology and Art’, in K. Weitzmann (1980), 101–20. SIMSON, Otto von (1948), Sacred Fortress: Art and Statecraft in Ravenna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). SNYDER, G. (2003), Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before Constantine, rev. edn. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press). STRZYGOWSKI, J. (1923), The Origin of Christian Church Art: New Facts and Principles of Research (Oxford: Clarendon Press). THEISSEN, G. (1982), Social Setting of Pauline Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). WEITZMANN, K. (1979) (ed.), Age of Spirituality: Catalogue of the Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 19, 1977–February 12, 1978 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art).

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—— (1980), Age of Spirituality: A Symposium (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art). —— and Kessler, H. L. (1990), The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks). WHARTON, A. J. (1995), Refiguring the Post-Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna (New York: Cambridge University Press). WILPERT, J. (1901), Die Malerein der Katakomben Roms (Freiburg i. B.: Herder).

—— (1916), Die römischen Mosaiken und Maleriien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV. bis XIII. Jahrhundert, 4 vols., 2nd edn. (Freiburg i. B.: Herder).

—— (1929–36), I sarcofagi cristiani antichi, 4 vols. (Rome: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana). —— (1938), La fede della chiesa nascente: secondo i monumenti dell'arte funeraria antica (Vatican City: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana).

end p.119

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [120]-[139]

6 Epigraphy William Tabbernee Abstract: Field-work – Editions – General Epigraphic Guides, Handbooks, and Internet Sources – Published Inscriptions – Identifying Christian Inscriptions – Published Collections of Specifically Christian Inscriptions – Other Published Christian Inscriptions – Handbooks on and Introductions to Christian Epigraphy – Scholarship – Conclusion Keywords: Christ, Collect, Christian DISPLAYED prominently on a large wall of the National Museum in Carthage, Tunisia, are the carefully reassembled remains of what was once a rectangular marble slab approximately 1.13 meters wide and 0.80 meters high. The thirty-four extant fragments of the slab were meticulously pieced together during 1906–7 by Father Alfred-Louis Delattre, soon after he had discovered these fragments in the ruins of the Basilica majorum on the outskirts of Carthage. The text of the inscription carved on the marble slab reveals that it was a commemorative plaque honouring North Africa's most famous early Christian martyrs:

[+ 2+ + 4+ [+] + 2+ + 4+ +

Hic] sunt marty[res] Saturus, Satu[r]n[inus], Rebocatus, S[e]c[undulus], Felicit(as), Per[pe]t(ua), pas(si) n[on(as) Mart(ias)]. Maiulu[s — c.16 — ] Here are the martyrs Saturus, Saturninus, Revocatus, Secundulus, Felicitas (and) Perpetua, who suffered on March 7. Mavilus....

Perpetua was a young Roman matron who, according to the Passio sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (7. 9; 16. 3), was put to death in the amphitheatre in Carthage during public spectacles celebrating the birthday of Geta Caesar (Tabbernee 2005). Publius Septimius Geta, the son of the Roman emperor Lucius Septimius Severus (193–211), was born on the nones of March (= 7 March), enabling the restoration at the end of line 4. The restored letters in lines 1–3 are also based on the passio, end p.120

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Fig. 6.1 Inscription commemorating Perpetua and other North African martyrs. which records that a slave girl named Felicitas and four men (Saturus, Saturninus, Revocatus, and Secundulus) died in the amphitheatre at the same time as Perpetua. The spelling REBOCATUS (Fig. 6.1, line 3) with a B rather than a V is not unusual in Latin inscriptions and reflects local pronunciation. Similarly, letters were also often transposed by careless, even illiterate, stonecutters, as at the beginning of line 5, which should have been carved as MAVILVS not MAIVLVS. The year in which Perpetua and her companions were martyred is not reported by the inscription, but is almost certainly 203 (Leclercq 1939: col. 420). The style of the lettering on the extant fragments of the slab, however, reveals that the plaque was made and erected centuries after the martyrs' deaths and, therefore, is not even a close contemporary of the martyrs whom it honours. The elegantly carved letters are in a style popular when the Vandal kings ruled North Africa. This particular plaque was probably made during the reign of Hilderic (523–30), presumably replacing an earlier plaque installed in the crypt during the fourth century at the time the Basilica majorum was constructed (Ennabli 1986: 191). The Basilica majorum appears to have been built on the site of an even earlier martyrium containing the relics of Perpetua and other martyrs. Whether or not such an earlier martyrium had any connection with the actual burial place of Perpetua (as assumed by Dunn 2005: 445 and n. 88) is, however, uncertain. Although another inscription (CIL 8, 4. 25272) also found at the Basilica majorum bearing the text Perpetue filie dulcissimae (Fig. 6.2) was claimed by Delattre (1908: 61–3) as Perpetua's original tombstone, this is highly doubtful (Tabbernee 1997: 110–12). The fourth-century Basilica majorum, and presumably the earlier martyrium, also contained the bones of martyrs other than those who died in 203. Line 5 of end p.121

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Fig. 6.2 Epitaph of a Perpetua, sweetest daughter. the plaque reveals the name of one North African martyr whose relics had been transferred, at some time, to the Basilica majorum or its predecessor. The martyr was probably Mavilus of Hadrumetum (Tertullian, Scap. 3. 5), who was put to death between 184 and 188 or 191 and 193 when Caecilius Capella was governor of Africa Proconsularis (Birley 1991: 87–90, esp. 89 n. 28; Dunn 2005: 445–6). After Mavilus's name there is space for approximately sixteen more letters (or symbols) in line 5, which may have contained either a date for Mavilus's martyrdom or the names of other martyrs. The sixth-century plaque, originally from the crypt of the Basilica majorum but now in the Carthage National Museum, illustrates both the meticulous work which epigraphers (also known as epigraphists) have to undertake to publish accurate editions of inscriptions and the crucial importance of this painstaking work. Put simply: epigraphy is the academic study of texts which are normally inscribed rather than produced by calligraphy. Inscriptions were usually (but not invariably) produced professionally, frequently in workshops consisting of master stonemasons and other artisans. The master stonemasons, at least theoretically, checked the work carried out by less experienced stonecutters. Inscriptions were carved on a number of different hard surfaces (stone, brick, wall stucco, pottery, metal)—although by far the most common materials were marble and (less expensive) limestone. Professionally prepared inscriptions were generally painted as well as inscribed, the colour red being particularly popular for highlighting the indented letters. Sometimes inscribed letters, especially those on ossuaries (‘bone boxes’), were filled in with charcoal. Epigraphy also studies ancient texts which take the form of ‘inscriptions’ but were painted rather than inscribed (e.g. on wood) or made from letters cut out from metal such as bronze and mounted on other surfaces. Mosaics often include ‘inscriptions’ made, like the rest of the mosaic, of tesserae (small coloured pieces of stone or glass). Ancient graffiti, scratched into rocks or walls, are also epigraphic texts. end p.122

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved The academic discipline of epigraphy includes the search for and discovery of

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hitherto unknown (or unpublished) inscriptions, the publication of accurate editions and translations of and commentaries on inscriptions, and the scholarly discussion and dissemination of the data provided by inscriptions.

6.1 Field-work Epigraphy as a ‘science’ (like its related discipline archaeology) has come a long way with respect to handling responsibly the extant material evidence of the past. No longer are inscriptions haphazardly extracted from the ground or cut from ancient walls and carried off to museums or private collections. The governments of most countries now have stringent controls in place regarding who can (and cannot) have access to archaeological sites and how these sites are to be excavated under government supervision. Archaeological teams normally include epigraphers who measure, photograph, take squeezes (paper ‘casts’), make transcriptions, provisional restorations, and translations of the texts of any inscriptions (including graffiti) found on the site. Professional epigraphers also examine inscriptions which are still in situ at sites other than those related to archaeological digs. This is the case especially in countries like Turkey, where countless early Christian inscriptions are still to be seen in and around rural villages (e.g. IMont 17, 21, 24, 33, 69). When the stone on which an inscription is carved is no longer in the place where it was originally erected, it is sometimes possible to locate the ‘find-spot’ through ‘ethno-archaeology’, that is, interviewing locals, especially elderly villagers, about the original location of inscribed stones in their area; for example, see Tabbernee (2003: 87–9) and Lampe and Tabbernee (2004). The information provided by ethno-archaeology, however, needs to be treated with a great deal of caution—as archaeologists and epigraphers may be told what the villagers think they want to hear. Multiple and independent attestation of oral data is required before the data can be considered reliable. Sometimes the stones on which inscriptions are carved have been reused in walls of more recent buildings or as ‘water fountains’ (e.g. IMont 9, 48), with the inscriptions and/or Christian symbols still clearly visible. Such reused stones are called spolia. Spolia can be sources of important epigraphic data (Saradi 1997; Yasin 2000); but the value of these data is enhanced, as with inscriptions now in museums or private collections, if there is information available about provenance (sometimes referred to as ‘provenience’), that is, regarding exactly where the stones were before their reuse or transfer to a museum or other type of collection. end p.123

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Recording the current provenance (as well as the original find-spot) where an inscription is located is important—even if all that can be recorded is the name of the modern village and a comment such as ‘in the wall of a house’, ‘in the grounds of the mosque’, or ‘in a field’.

6.2 Editions Following his field-work at the ruins of Basilica majorum, Delattre wrote a number of papers publishing his findings. The first of these (Delattre 1907b) contains the editio princeps (i.e. the first, or primary, edition) of the inscription honouring Perpetua, her co-martyrs, and Mavilus. An editio princeps, however, is not necessarily the best edition, as subsequent editions have the benefit of more extensive examination both of the inscription itself and of other data which may

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supply (or suggest) restoration of missing letters or symbols. Delattre's editio princeps, for example, does not restore NON MART at the end of line 4, whereas in the edition which Delattre published only a few months later (1907a: 405–6), these words are restored. In both editions a Latin-style cross rather than a Greek-style cross is printed before each of the five lines, even though the photograph of the reassembled pieces of the commemorative plaque, published along with Delattre's editio princeps, clearly shows Greek, not Latin, crosses at lines 3–4 and the lower half of a Greek cross at line 2. A ‘Greek cross’ (crux quadrata) has equilateral horizontal bars, whereas in a ‘Latin cross’ (crux immissa), the horizontal bar cuts across the vertical approximately one-third from the top. Neither of Delattre's 1907 editions indicates that the crosses in lines 1 and 2 are restorations, or that some of the non-restored letters and symbols are only partially visible. Delattre should not be blamed for what today would be judged as editorial shortcomings in his publications of the commemorative plaque he had discovered at the Basilica majorum. It was not until 1931 that an international standardized method of publishing inscriptions was agreed upon by epigraphers at Leiden, the Netherlands, and slightly amended subsequently (Dow 1969). One of the most important aspects of ‘the Leiden system’ is the use of standard sigla (‘signs’) to denote exactly how the text of an inscription has been edited. Some of the most frequently used sigla are shown in Table 6.1. The term ‘ligature’ in Table 6.1 refers to the epigraphic result of carving two or more letters together by using part of the previous letter to form the subsequent letter in order to conserve space on the stone. For example, the first word of end p.124

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Table 6.1. Standard epigraphic sigla Individual letters are legible but do not make sense in their AB context Letters are no longer extant but were still visible when copied by an earlier editor. ‘Underdots’ indicate that letters are not completely legible, although the accuracy of the reading is deemed certain. ——— Four letters are missing. [——c.8——] About eight letters are missing. [ ] Letters are missing but restored by the editor. < > Letters originally omitted are added by the editor.

( {

) }

The editor has corrected wrong letters in the text. The editor has resolved an abbreviation in the text. Erroneous letters are cancelled by the editor. A (still legible) original erasure. Letters are written above the line. A ligature. An abbreviation is indicated by the original text. The letter stands for a numerical equivalent.

(v.), (vv.), One, two, or several letter spaces are left blank. (vac.) the phrase (‘in memory’) was frequently carved on tombstones as , that is, the letters , , , , , and (utilizing a quadratic sigma). In editions using the standardized Leiden system, the word would be . printed In Greek inscriptions, alphabetic numerals following the words for year, month,

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and/or day are often placed at the beginning of epigraphic texts. The resultant date, of course, needs to be converted to its modern equivalent, as the alphabetic numerals refer to regional or local ‘eras’, months, and days. Greek and Latin inscriptions were carved in capital letters, normally without breaks between words, although some inscriptions contain small marks (e.g. dots, triangles, leaves), called interpuncts, to separate words or to indicate that the previous letters stand for an abbreviation. Because in editions words are printed separately, interpuncts are normally included only if they originally signified a separation between groups of words. Abbreviations may also be indicated by marks above letters, such as the double curved vertical lines resembling quotation marks in line 4 of the Perpetua plaque (Fig. 6.1). More common indicators of intentional abbreviations in epigraphic texts are horizontal lines called macrons. In Christian inscriptions, macrons are frequently used to designate nomina sacra (‘sacred names’); for example, IC XC stands for ( ) , that is, ‘Jesus Christ’. Quadratic sigmas, especially in the Byzantine period, were frequently carved (or painted) in the shape of a C. end p.125

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6.3 General Epigraphic Guides, Handbooks, and Internet Sources A list of Latin epigraphic abbreviations is contained in Gordon (1983: 207–25), which remains a helpful, practical guide to reading Latin inscriptions, as are Susini (1973) and Keppie (1991). Capelli (1961) contains more than 1,400 Latin abbreviations and ligatures. Useful introductions to studying Greek inscriptions are Pfohl (1977), Woodhead (1981), and Cook (1987). Regarding epigraphy as a source for ancient historians, see Woodhead (1977), Millar (1983), and Bodel (2001). The most recent and most comprehensive guide to epigraphy is Bérard et al. (2000), which publishes annual supplements, which may be downloaded from the internet. Since the 1980s, digitalization of inscriptions has enabled the production of electronic epigraphic data bases, available via CD-ROM and/or the internet; see Bérard et al. (2000) and Fonti epigrafiche, which has links to all the other most relevant sites on epigraphy.

6.4 Published Inscriptions Other than for professional epigraphers, published inscriptions are far more accessible than those still in situ or even in museums. Many universities possess the Corpus inscriptionum latinarum (CIL) (1862– ), the Corpus inscriptionum graecarum (CIG) (1828–77), its geographically organized successor Inscriptiones graecae (IG) (1924– ), the Corpus inscriptionum iudaicarum (CII; frequently abbreviated as CIJ) (1936–52), and more recently published collections such as the various volumes of the series Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien (1972– ). Annuals, such as L'année épigraphique (AE) (1888– ) and the Supplementum epigraphicum graecum (SEG) (1923–71; 1979– ), are intended to keep scholars informed about the publication of newly discovered inscriptions and about new editions of already published inscriptions. Similarly, the lists of the epigraphic texts of various cities published by McCabe et al. (e.g. IEphMcCabe (1991)) are helpful in quickly gaining a comprehensive overview of the range of inscriptions from a particular location. The Actes des congrès internationaux d'épigraphie grecque et latine, published since 1952, contain a wealth of information about the latest in epigraphic scholarship. See Bérard et al. (2000)

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for lists of standardized abbreviations of corpora and other epigraphic works. Horsley and Lee (1994) provide a checklist of abbreviations for Greek epigraphic volumes. end p.126

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6.5 Identifying Christian Inscriptions Identifying inscriptions, especially pre-Constantinian inscriptions, as Christian is not as simple as some of the early handbooks on Christian epigraphy have assumed—especially when examining inscriptions which may be Jewish rather than Christian (Kraemer 1991). The earliest Christians, even if they were sufficiently wealthy to participate in the ‘epigraphic habit’ of the Roman Empire (MacMullen 1982), did not distinguish their tombstones with specifically Christian symbols, formulae, or words. Claims of identifiably Christian inscriptions from the first or early second centuries (ICUR 1. 1–4; EG 4: 440–4 no. 1; compare Guarducci (1992: 279–80)) are overly optimistic. Only from the second half of the second century onward do we see clear evidence of Christianity on stelai (grave-markers) and, of course, on or near Christian graves in the catacombs at Rome or elsewhere.

6.5.1 Symbols The earliest dated recognizably Christian tombstone is probably that of a man named Eutyches (Calder 1955: 33–5 no. 2). The object which the deceased is shown holding in his right hand appears to be eucharistic bread (the panis quadratus; compare IMont 3, 5–7), and the bunch of grapes in his left hand presumably represents eucharistic wine. Other (non-Christian) interpretations of these symbols, however, are possible. As with other Christian art on public display (Clement of Alexandria, Paed. 3. 59 .2–60. 1), it seems that Christians for the first three centuries chose symbols which were part of the wider culture but which also had special Christian significance (Finney 1994: 108–14). The presence of such symbols (e.g. dove, palm branch, anchor, fish) often help to identify as Christian otherwise religiously neutral inscriptions. However, symbols, even those popular among Christians, because they were shared with people from other cultures and religions, are not infallible indicators of Christianity. The earliest extant epigraphic use of the now well-known

(‘FISH’)

acrostic, standing for the words ( ) ( ) ( ), that is, ‘Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour’, is not in the form of a decorative symbol but as part of the text of the tombstone of Aberkios, bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, c. 180 (Ramsay 1897: 722–9; compare Hirschmann 2000, 2003; Tabbernee, forthcoming). Lines 17–22 read: ‘Having Paul in the carriage, Faith led the way everywhere and set before me as nourishment everywhere a fish from a spring, immense, spotless, which a holy virgin caught.’ Aberkios's epitaph also contains a number of other purposely ambiguous allusions to Christianity, such as to end p.127

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epigraphic expressions on monuments erected in places where they could be seen by anyone is not surprising. From c. 200, however, Christian communities were able to own their own cemeteries (Tertullian, Scap. 3. 1; Origen, Hom. in Jer. 4. 13. 6). The most famous of these are the catacombs in Rome (Fiocchi Nicolai, Bisconti, and Mazzoleni, 1999). Therefore, from the beginning of the third century, open expressions of Christianity in ‘secure’ burial locations were not only possible but became common—although not every extant epitaph in Christian cemeteries is necessarily Christian.

6.5.2 Formulae Gradually during the third century, even tombstones erected by Christians in public places became more openly Christian, depending on the level of security Christians felt at particular times and in particular locations. For example, in the area around Eumeneia in Phrygia, Christians began to adopt and adapt an originally non-Christian funerary curse formula. This curse formula, directed at potential grave violators (e.g. IMont 20, 33, 35), reads: (‘He [or she] will have to reckon with God’). Christian adaptations of this formula reveal progressively more openly that, for them, was a reference to the God of the Christians (Tabbernee 1983: 136–9; 1997: 144–7). formula, so not Jews, however, also adopted the every adaptation of the formula is automatically to be deemed Christian. Similarly, not every inscription which includes seemingly traditional ‘pagan’ formulae need be non-Christian. For example, the common ‘pagan’ abbreviation D·M·S (Dis manibus sacrae; i.e. ‘Sacred to the Divine Spirits of the Lower World’) was frequently retained by Christians on their tombstones—especially if they bought stones from a workshop which had pre-carved these abbreviations at the top of the stone. The Christians simply reinterpreted the abbreviation to stand for Deo magno sacrum (‘Sacred to the Great God’) (Grossi Gondi 1920: 480). formula The so-called ‘Christians for Christians’ ( (e.g. IMont 24–9, 31, 38–52) is the most openly Christian expression on pre-Constantinian tombstones. Formerly commonly classified as Montanist, the sectarian designation of the ‘Christians for Christians’ inscriptions is no longer viable (Tabbernee 1997: 147–50, 405–6, 553–6). Similarly, the formula (‘here lies’), or one of its variants (e.g. IMont 59–62, 72–4, 80, 93–5), popular among Christians from the fourth century onward, can no longer be held to be exclusively Christian. end p.128

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6.5.3 Specific Words, Phrases, or Designations The most obvious single epigraphic indicator of Christianity, of course, is the word ‘Christian’ or ‘Christians’, whether in a formula or by itself. One of the earliest dated examples of the use of the word ‘Christian’ to mark a grave other than in the catacombs is IMont 17, which has a date which equates to either 24 May or 16 July, 243. The grave altar on which this inscription was carved also contains one of the earliest extant Latin crosses on a publicly displayed Christian tombstone. In the catacombs, descriptions of the deceased as fidelis (‘one of the faithful’) or neophytus/a (‘novice’, i.e. ‘recently baptized’) often substitute for the word ‘Christian’. The presence of the word

(e.g. IMont 68), that is, ‘sleeping place’

for the deceased (‘cemetery’) or the word

(‘to sleep’), especially when

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part of the formula (‘here sleeps’; e.g. IMont 87), still provides a reasonably reliable indication of Christianity. Phrases such as depositum/a est (‘is buried’), in Deo (‘in God’), in pace (‘in peace’), and titles such as , however, were commonly shared at least with Jews, and hence are not as indicative of Christianity as was once thought (Kraemer 1991). References to martyrs, such as Perpetua and Felicitas; to apostles, bishops, abbots, or abbesses; to archdeacons, deacons (male and female); to lesser clergy with designations like subdeacon, acolyte, exorcist, lector (reader), notarius, steward, and doorkeeper; or to monks, anchorites, virgins, and widows, are usually positive indicators of the Christian nature of an inscription.

6.5.4 Alleged ‘crypto-Christian’ indicators of Christianity Great caution needs to be exercised with regard to inscriptions sometimes designated ‘crypto-Christian’: for example, those allegedly using palindromes, acronym-acrostics, isopsephisms, or cryptograms. A palindrome is a word square

Fig. 6.3 Rotas /sator palindrome.

end p.129

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Fig. 6.4 Rotas /sator palindrome with tenet forming cross.

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which reads the same in four directions. The central word of the pre-Constantinian rotas/sator palindrome (Fig. 6.3) is tenet (‘he/she holds fast to’), which when read downwards and across forms a cross (Fig. 6.4), at each point commenced and concluded with a T (symbol for cross?) flanked by AO (=A ?). The letters can also be rearranged (Fig. 6.5) to twice form the word paternoster (‘Our Father’) with the AO (Grosser 1926). Christian use of this (probably originally Mithraic) palindrome, however, may be as late as 500 CE (Tabbernee 1997: 24–5). The letters XM which are inscribed prominently on some third-century as well as later (definitely Christian) inscriptions used to be interpreted as a cryptic) ( ) [‘Mary gives birth to Christian acronym-acrostic for ( Christ’] (e.g. Tjäder 1970). It has recently been shown, however, that the letters XM form an isopsephism (Llewelyn 1997): that is, an alphabetic numeral having the same numeric value as the word or phrase for which it stands. XM for

stands

(the letters of which equal 9 + 5 + 70 + 200 + 2 + 70 + 8 + 9

+ 70 + 200 = 643, i.e. XM . The term (‘God the Helper’) is not exclusively Christian, but certainly became popular among Christians, especially as part of imprecations, including those inscribed on amulets or on door lintels. Guarducci's theory (1978b) that, in the pre-Constantinian era, there was extensive use by Christians of ‘mystical cryptology’ has not won widespread support. The examples she cites come mainly from the Christian catacombs, where the need for secrecy would have been irrelevant. Rather than comprising an esoteric language made up of ‘cryptograms’ (e.g. P = Peter; T = Cross; S = Salvation), as Guarducci claims, it seems best to view the juxtaposition of letters and symbols as the creative (or careless) use of ligatures and/or a kind of epigraphic shorthand (Tabbernee, forthcoming). end p.130

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Fig. 6.5 Rotas /sator palindrome rearranged to form paternoster.

6.6 Published Collections of Specifically Christian Inscriptions One of the earliest and most extensive printed collections of exclusively Christian inscriptions is Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae (ICUR; also ICVR) (1861–1915; new series 1922–92 (ICUR 2; ICVR 2). Volume 2, 1 of ICUR contains the texts of no longer extant Christian inscriptions from Rome known from the testimonia of pilgrims and other travellers who, from the late antique period onward, copied and recorded the inscriptions they saw in manuscripts or early printed works in collections known as syllogae. In accordance with standard epigraphic practice, end p.131

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved collections of inscriptions or testimonia are cited, in this chapter, not by editor but by standardized abbreviations. For the sake of convenience, cross-references from the particular abbreviation to the editor is provided below. Christian inscriptions from Italy as a whole are published in the series Inscriptiones Christianae Italiae (1989– ). The first in this series, Inscriptiones graecae christianae veteres occidentis (IGOccidChr) (1989), contains many significant inscriptions from elsewhere in Italy as well as from Rome. The series also includes a useful concordance (Felle 1991), cross-referencing the inscriptions published in IGOccidChr with their publication in earlier corpora or journals. Other volumes are devoted to specific Italian cities. A great number of corpora of the Christian inscriptions from other geographic regions exist. Three illustrative examples of these are the Recueil des inscriptions chrétiennes de Macédoine du IIIe au VIe siècle (IMakedChr) (1983), The Greek Christian Inscriptions of Crete (IKretChr) (1970), and the Recueil des inscriptions grecques chrétiennes d'Asie Mineure (IAsMinChr) (1922). Sometimes corpora, including regionally based ones, concentrate on particular types of inscriptions; for example, Les inscriptions funéraires chrétiennes de Carthage (ICKarth) (1975–91) (ICKarth 2. 1 = Perpetua plaque); The ‘Christians for Christians’ Inscriptions of Phrygia (IPhrygChr) (1978); Montanist Inscriptions and Testimonia (IMont) (1997) (IMont 14 = Perpetua plaque). Some published collections of Christian inscriptions feature representative samples, rather than all the known inscriptions from a particular region or category. The most comprehensive collection of sample Christian inscriptions is Inscriptiones latinae christianae veteres (ILCV) (1961–85) (ILCV 1. 2041 = Perpetua plaque), but see also Nunn (1920), Wischmeyer (1982), Johnson (1995), and Snyder (2003: 209–66). Perhaps the most beautifully carved Christian inscriptions are the metrical epitaphs composed by Pope Damasus (366–84), and crafted by Furius Dionysius Philocalus, to commemorate the martyrs buried in the catacombs and elsewhere in Rome. The Damasus epigrams have been collected, edited, and published by Ferrua (1942); see also Kaufmann (1917: 338–65) and Mazzoleni (1999: 174–9).

6.7 Other Published Christian Inscriptions Scattered throughout the major corpora are numerous early Christian inscriptions, easily located via the indexes of individual volumes or separately published indexes covering multiple volumes. For example, CIL 8, 4. 25038 is the Perpetua plaque and CIG 4. 8606–9595a are all Christian inscriptions. The indexes of L'année end p.132

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved épigraphique and the Supplementum epigraphicum graecum are extremely helpful for locating inscriptions relevant to the study of early Christianity. Especially useful are the Bulletin épigraphique (1888–1984; 1987– ), published in the Revue des études grecques, and L'année philologique, both of which have extensive sections specifically about Christian inscriptions. Early Christian inscriptions are also published in monographs and/or discussed in journals devoted to epigraphy in general, such as Epigraphica Anatolica or the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. Notices on new inscriptions also appear

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regularly in the Journal of Roman Studies, the Classical Review, and the American Journal of Archaeology. Repertoria, that is detailed catalogues describing and giving preliminary texts rather than definitive editions of epigraphic texts, often provide early access to inscriptions—including Christian ones (e.g. Pilhofer 2000).

6.8 Handbooks on and Introductions to Christian Epigraphy The fourth volume of Epigrafia greca (Guarducci 1978a), includes the best introduction to early (Greek) Christian inscriptions. Marucchi (1912), Kaufmann (1917), and Grossi Gondi (1920), while superseded in terms of epigraphic methodology and editions of epigraphic texts, are still helpful introductions to Christian epigraphy as a whole. Each of these handbooks contains numerous illustrative examples of early Christian inscriptions. Similar examples, often with beautiful line drawings, also abound in the Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (1920–53). For survey articles on Christian epigraphy, see Guarducci (1992) and McHugh (1997). Keppie (1991: 119–24) and Markschies (1995: 32–6) also give a helpful brief introduction to the field.

6.9 Scholarship Inscriptions provide unique glimpses into the lives (and deaths) of early Christian women and men, prophets and prophetesses, clergy and laity, ‘orthodox’ and ‘heretics’, martyrs and monks. Such unfiltered epigraphic glimpses, devoid of much of the editorial bias inherent in extant literary historical documents mainly written from the perspective of ‘the winners’, often provide new, or hitherto not noticed, data regarding the ‘losers’ (e.g. the Montanists) or the ‘powerless’ (e.g. women). end p.133

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved These, until now mainly overlooked, data have enabled recent scholars to provide a more accurate account of the social identity of early Christians (Schöllgen 1984; Lampe 2003), including those deemed heretical (Tabbernee 1997: 556–69), and of the role of women in the early church (Eisen 2000; Madigan and Osiek 2005). Particularly revealing have been the epigraphic data regarding ordained women and women who, even if not ordained, carried out significant ecclesiastical functions in the early church. Female presbyters are attested epigraphically in the context of Montanism (IMont 4) and, most likely, also in the context of protoCatholic and Catholic Christianity, although some of the relevant presbutera inscriptions have been interpreted by some scholars to refer to ‘old women’, ‘wives of male presbyters’, or considered to be Jewish rather than Christian. For the case that at least some of the extant presbutera inscriptions refer to ‘mainstream’ Christian, ordained women ecclesiastical office-bearers, see Tabbernee (1997: 67–70), Eisen (2000: 116–32), and Madigan and Osiek (2005: 169–71, 193–8). A fifth-century Christian sarcophagus inscription (CIL 3. 14900) from ancient Salona (modern Solin, Croatia), contains the word [sace]rdotae, indicating that the sarcophagus was that of a woman with priestly (sacerdotal) responsibilities. As ‘sacerdotess’, she was at least a woman presbyter, but may even have been a bishop. The title episcopa occurs in three extant inscriptions, but it is difficult to know exactly what the term signifies in those inscriptions. CIL 11. 4339 (originally from Interamna Nahars (modern Terni, Italy) but now at St Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome) refers to a venerabilis fem[ina] episcopa. The name of this

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‘venerable woman’ with the title episcopa most likely commenced with a Q, although the Q may be part of a phrase giving her age at death (ILCV 1. 121: qa[e vix. |a... ]). In the past, the Interamna Nahars inscription has usually been interpreted as the epitaph of the wife of a bishop. It may be, however, that ‘Q’(?) was the mother of a bishop (Madigan and Osiek 2005: 193): namely, Pope Siricius (384–99). Similarly, the designation episcopa in the other two extant inscriptions with the term (Eisen 2000: 200–5) may also have been honorific references: namely, to Theodora, the mother of Pope Paschal I (817–24). Both Theodora inscriptions, one on a mosaic and the other on a commemorative plaque, are in the chapel of St Zeno in the church of Santa Prassede in Rome, dedicated by Paschal I. Perhaps ‘Q’(?) and Theodora held actual, rather than honorific, episcopal roles; but this is neither proven nor ruled out by the extant epigraphic (or literary) data. Overwhelming epigraphic confirmation of the existence of women who held the actual ecclesiastical office of deacon, however, does exist (Eisen 2000: 158–98; Madigan and Osiek 2005: 67–96, 143–5). There are also numerous inscriptions of ecclesiastically designated women commemorated epigraphically as prophets/prophetesses, theological teachers, financial administrators, members of the order of widows, virgins, and heads of religious communities (Eisen 2000; Madigan and Osiek 2005). end p.134

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6.10 Conclusion Well over 50,000 early Christian inscriptions have been published thus far, and more are being discovered every day. Most of these are in Greek or Latin, but early Christian inscriptions or testimonia to such inscriptions exist also in many other languages, including Syriac, Coptic, and even Chinese. The historical data provided by the huge number of early Christian inscriptions are indispensable to the non-specialist as well as the specialist student of early Christianity. Understanding and interpreting such data correctly demands at least a rudimentary knowledge of the methodology, resources, and results of the academic discipline called epigraphy—such as that provided by this chapter. Nothing, of course, is a substitute for seeing actual inscriptions—ideally with a published edition (and, if necessary, translation) in hand. Catalogues are available to guide one to the specific location of particular inscriptions in museums and in the catacombs, although some inscriptions may not be on public display or have been moved since the catalogue was published. Visiting museums such as Carthage's National Museum to see the Perpetua plaque, the Vatican's Museo Pio Cristiani to see Aberkios's gravestone, or the catacombs to see Damasus's metrical inscriptions honouring the Roman martyrs are memorable experiences. Turning over the pages of the large leather-bound volumes of the great corpora of published inscriptions, commenced in the nineteenth century, can be almost as rewarding. These magnificent large-print volumes often include beautiful line drawings of the inscriptions and of the monuments on which they were inscribed. More recent collections often publish excellent photographs of, and commentaries about, the inscriptions with which they deal. A good way to become familiar with the range of early Christian inscriptions is to start with the following resources. Suggested Reading The following are recommended: Eisen (2000); Finegan (1992); Fiocchi Nicolai, Bisconti, and Mazzoleni (1999); Horsley et al. (1981–); Keppie (1991); Kraemer (1991, 2004); Madigan and Osiek (2005); Marucchi (1912); Snyder (2003); and Tabbernee (1997).

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Abbreviations used in text which are not included in the Abbreviations section on pp. xiv–xxiv. EG: see Guarducci (1967–78) IAsMinChr: see Grégoire (1922) ICKarth: see Ennabli (1975–91) IEphMcCabe: see McCabe et al. (1991) IG: see Hiller de Gaertringen et al. (1924–) end p.135

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved IKretChr: see Bandy (1970) IMakedChr: see Feissel (1983) IMont: see Tabbernee (1997) IPhrygChr: see Gibson (1978) Bibliography

BANDY , A. C. (1970), The Greek Inscriptions of Crete, Christianikai Epigraphai t s Hellados, 10 (Athens: Christian Archaeological Society). BÉRARD, F., et al. (2000) (eds.), Guide de l'épigraphiste: Bibliographie choisie des épigraphies antiques et médiévales, 3rd edn. (Paris: Éditions rue d'Ulm).

BIRLEY , A. R. (1991), ‘Caecilius Capella: Persecutor of Christians, Defender of Byzantium’, GRBS 32: 81–98. BODEL, J. (2001) (ed.), Epigraphic Evidence: Ancient History from Inscriptions (London: Routledge). BOECKH, A., et al. (1827–77) (eds.), Corpus inscriptionum graecarum, i–iv plus Index (Berlin: Reimer; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1977). CABROL, F., and LECLERCQ, H. (1920–53) (eds.), Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (Paris: Letouzey et Ané). CAGNAT, R., et al. (1888–) (eds.), L'année épigraphique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). CALDER, W. M. (1955), ‘Early Christian Epitaphs from Phrygia’, Anatolian Studies, 5: 25–38. CAPELLI, A. (1961), Lexicon abbreviaturarum: Dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane, 6th edn. (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli; repr., 1994). COOK, B. F. (1987), Greek Inscriptions (Berkeley: University of California Press).

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DELATTRE, A.-L. (1907a), ‘Inscriptions chrétiennes de Carthage’, Revue Tunisien, 14: 405–19. —— (1907b), ‘Lettre du R. P. Delattre à M. Héron de Villefosse sur l'inscription des Martyrs de Carthage, Sainte Perpétue, Sainte Félicité et leur compagnons’, CRAI, 5th ser. 8: 193–5. —— (1908), ‘La basilica majorum’, CRAI, 5th ser. 9: 59–69. DE ROSSI, J.-B., and GATTI, G. (1861–1915) (eds.), Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae septimo saeculo antiquiores, i; ii, 1 and Supplementum fascicle 1 (Rome: Officina Libraria Pontificia, P. Cuggiani). DIEHL, E. (1961–85) (ed.), Inscriptiones latinae christianae veteres, i–iii, 2nd edn.; iv: Supplementum; v: Nuove correzione allo Silloge del Diehl (Zürich: Weidmann; Vatican City: Istituto di archeologia cristiana). DOW , S. (1969), Conventions in Editing: A Suggested Reformulation of the Leiden System, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Scholarly Aids, 2, 2nd edn. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). DUNN, G. D. (2005), ‘Mavilus of Hadrumetum, African Proconsuls and Mediaeval Martyrologies’, in C. Deroux (ed.), Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History, xii, Collection Latomus, 27 (Brussels: Latomus), 433–46. EISEN, U. E. (2000), Women Office Holders in Early Christianity: Epigraphical and Literary Studies, trans. L. M. Maloney (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press).

ENNABLI, L. (1975–91), Les inscriptions funéraries chrétiennes de Carthage, i–iii, Collection de l'École française de Rome, 25, 62, 151 (Rome: École française de Rome). end p.136

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved —— (1986), ‘Les inscriptions chrétiennes de Carthage et leur apport pour la connaissance de la Carthage chrétienne’, in A. Mastino (ed.), L'Africa romana: Atti del III convegno di studio Sassari, 13–15 dicembre 1985 (Sassari: Edizioni Gallizzi), 189–203. FEISSEL, D. (1983), Recueil des inscriptions chrétiennes de Macédoine du III e au VI e siècle, Bulletin de Correspondence Hellenique, Suppl. 8 (Paris: de Boccard).

FELLE, A. E. (1991), Concordanze della inscriptions graecae christianae veteres

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occidentis, Inscriptiones Christianae Italiae, 2 (Bari: Edipuglia). FERRUA, A. (1942), Epigrammata Damasiana (Rome: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana). FINEGAN, J. (1992), The Archaeology of the New Testament: The Life of Jesus and the Beginning of the Early Church, rev. edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press). FINNEY , P. C. (1994), The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press). FIOCCHI NICOLAI, V., BISCONTI, F. F., and MAZZOLENI, D. (1999), The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, Inscriptions, trans. C. C. Stella and L.-A. Touchette (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner). FONTI EPIGRAFICHE (<www.rassegna.unibo.it/epigrafi.html >), 19 September 2006. FREY , J.-B. (1936–52) (ed.), Corpus inscriptionum iudicarum: Recueil des inscriptions juives qui vont du III e siècle avant Jésus-Christ au VII e siècle de notre ère, i–ii, Sussidi allo Studio della antichità Cristiane, 1, 3 (Vatican City: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana; vol. i repr. with corrections and additions, New York: KTAV, 1975). GIBSON, E. (1978), The ‘Christians for Christians’ Inscriptions of Phrygia: Greek Texts, Translations and Commentary, HTS 32 (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press).

GORDON, A. E. (1983), Illustrated Introduction to Latin Epigraphy (Berkeley: University of California Press). GRÉGOIRE, H. (1922), Recueil des inscriptions grecques chrétiennes d'Asie Mineure, fasc. 1 (the only one published) (Paris: Ernest Leroux; repr. Chicago: Ares, 1980). GROSSER, F. (1926), ‘Ein neuer Vorschlag zur Deuting der Sator-Formel: Pater noster’, Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 24: 165–9. GROSSI GONDI, F. (1920), Trattato di epigrafia cristiana: Latina e greca del mondo romano occidentale, I monumenti cristiani dei primi sei secoli, 1 (Rome: Università Gregoriana; repr. Rome: L'Erma di Bretschneider, 1968).

GUARDUCCI, M. (1967–78), Epigrafia greca, i–iv (Rome: Istituto della Stato).

—— (1978), ‘Dal gioco letterale alle crittografia mistica’, ANRW 2.16.2: 1736–73.

—— (1992), ‘Epigraphy, Christian’, in A. Di Berardino (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Early Church, trans. A. Walford (Oxford: Oxford University Press), i. 279–81.

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HILLER

DE

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GAERTRINGEN, F., et al. (1924–) (eds.), Inscriptiones graeca (Berlin:

Reimer, de Gruyter). HIRSCHMANN, V. (2000), ‘Untersuchungen zur Grabschrift des Aberkios’, ZPE 129: 109–16. —— (2003), ‘Ungelöste Rätsel?: Nochmals zur Grabschrift des Aberkios’, ZPE 145: 133–9. HONDIUS, J. J. E., et al. (1923–71, 1979–) (eds.), Supplementum epigraphicum graecum (Leiden: Nijhof; Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben). Consolidated indexes also published separately. HORSLEY , G. H. R., and LEE, J. A. L. (1994), ‘A Preliminary Checklist of Abbreviations of Greek Epigraphic, Volumes’, Epigraphica, 56: 129–69.

HORSLEY , G. H. R., et al. (1981–) (eds.), New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity (North Ryde, New South Wales: Macquarie University Ancient History Documentary Research Centre; Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans).

end p.137

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved HOUSSOLIER, B., et al. (1888–1984, 1987–) (eds.), Bulletin épigraphique, published in the Revue des études grecques. The issues edited by J. and L. Robert between 1938 and 1984 have been published separately in 10 vols. There are also five separately published indexes. JOHNSON, G. J. (1995), Early-Christian Epitaphs from Anatolia, SBLTT 35; Early Christian Literature Series, 8 (Atlanta: Scholars Press). KAUFMANN, C. M. (1917), Handbuch der altchristlichen Epigraphik (Freiburg: Herder). KEPPIE, L. J. F. (1991), Understanding Roman Inscriptions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). KRAEMER, R. S. (1991), ‘Jewish Tuna and Christian Fish: Identifying Religious Affiliation in Epigraphic Sources’, HTR 84: 141–62. —— (2004) (ed.), Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press). LAMPE, P. (2003), From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, ed. M. D. Johnson, trans. M. Steinhauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press).

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—— and TABBERNEE, W. (2004), ‘Das Reskript von Septimius Severus und Caracalla an die Kolonen der kaiserlichen Domäne von Tymion und Simoe’, EA 37: 169–78. LECLERCQ, H. (1939), ‘Perpétue et Félicité (Saintes)’, in DACL xiv. 1, cols. 393–444. LLEWELYN, S. R. (1997), ‘The Christian Symbol XMT, an Acrostic or an Isopsephism?’, in G. H. R. Horsley, et al. (eds.), New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, viii: A Review of the Greek Inscriptions and Papyri Published 1984–85 (North Ryde, New South Wales: Macquarie University Ancient History Documentary Research Centre; Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans), 156–68. MACMULLEN, R. (1982), ‘The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire’, American Journal of Philology, 103: 233–46. MADIGAN, K., and OSIEK, C. (2005) (eds. and trans.), Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).

MARKSCHIES, C. (1995), Arbeitsbuch Kirchengeschichte (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck). MARUCCHI, O. (1912), Christian Epigraphy: An Elementary Treatise with a Collection of Ancient Christian Inscriptions mainly of Roman Origin, trans. J. A. Willis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; repr. Chicago: Ares, 1974).

MAZZOLENI, D. (1999), ‘Inscriptions in Roman Catacombs’, in Fiocchi Nicolai et al. (1999), 146–85. MCCABE, D. F., et al. (1991) (eds.), Ephesos Inscriptions: Texts and Lists, i–ii, texts; iii: lists (Princeton: Princeton University Institute for Advanced Studies).

MCHUGH, M. P. (1997), ‘Inscriptions’, in E. Ferguson, et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, 2nd edn. (New York: Garland), 574–6. MILLAR, F. (1983), ‘Epigraphy’, in M. Crawford (ed.), Sources for Ancient History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 80–136. NUNN, H. P. V. (1920), Christian Inscriptions (London: S.P.C.K.; New York: Macmillan; repr. New York: Philosophical Library, 1952). PFOHL, G. (1977) (ed.), Das Studium der griechischen Epigraphik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft). PILHOFER, P. (2000), Philippi, ii: Katalog der Inschriften von Philippi, WUNT 119

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(Tübingen: J. B. C. Mohr/Paul Siebeck). end p.138

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved RAMSAY , W. M. (1897), The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia: Being an Essay of the Local History of Phrygia from the Earliest Times to the Turkish Conquest, i. Part 2: West and West-Central Phrygia (Oxford: Clarendon Press; repr. New York: Arno, 1975). RITSCHL, F. W., et al. (1862–) (eds.), Corpus inscriptionum latinarum (Berlin: Reimer, 1862–1932, de Gruyter, 1932–). SARADI, H. (1997), ‘The Use of Spolia in Byzantine Monuments: The Archeological and Literary Evidence’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 3: 395–423. SCHÖLLGEN, G. (1984), Ecclesia Sordida?: Zur Frage der socialen Schichtung frühchristlicher Gemeinden am Beispiel Karthagos zur zeit Tertullians, JAC, Ergänzungsband 12 (Münster: Aschendorff). SILVAGNI, A., et al. (1922–92) (eds.), Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae septimo saeculo antiquiores, nova series (Vatican City: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana). SNYDER, G. F. (2003), Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before Constantine, rev. edn. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press). SUSINI, G. (1973), The Roman Stonecutter: An Introduction to Latin Epigraphy, ed. E. Badian, trans. A. M. Dabrowski (Oxford: Blackwell). TABBERNEE, W. (1983), ‘Christian Inscriptions from Phrygia’, in G. H. R. Horsley, et al. (eds.), New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, iii: A Review of the Greek Inscriptions and Papyri Published in 1978 (North Ryde, New South Wales: Macquarie University Ancient History Documentary Research Centre; Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans), 128–39. —— (1997), Montanist Inscriptions and Testimonia: Epigraphic Sources Illustrating the History of Montanism, PMS, 16 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press; Washington: Catholic University of America Press). —— (2003), ‘Portals of the New Jerusalem: The Discovery of Pepouza and Tymion’, JECS 11: 87–94. —— (2005), ‘Perpetua, Montanism, and Christian Ministry in Carthage c.203 C.E.’, Perspectives in Religious Studies, 32: 421–41. —— (forthcoming), ‘Inscriptions: Clandestine/Crypto-Christian’, in P. C. Finney (ed.), Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Architecture (Grand Rapids, Mich.:

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William B. Eerdmans). TJÄDER, J.-O. (1970), ‘Christ, Our Lord, Born of the Virgin Mary (XMT and VDN), Eranos, 68: 148–90. WESSEL, C. (1989) (ed.), Inscriptiones graecae christianae veteres occidentis, Inscriptiones Christianae Italiae, 1 (Bari: Edipuglia). WISCHMEYER, W. (1982), Griechische und lateinische Inschriften zur Sozialgeschichte der Alten Kirche, Texte zur Kirchen- und Theologiegeschichte, 28 (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn). WOODHEAD, A. G. (1977), ‘Epigraphik und Geschichte’, in Pfohl (1977), 73–93. WOODHEAD, A. G.—— (1981), The Study of Greek Inscriptions, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; repr. 1992). YASIN, A. M. (2000), ‘Displaying the Sacred Past: Ancient Inscriptions in Early Modern Rome’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 7: 39–57.

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [140]-[166]

7 Palaeography and Codicology Ralph W. Mathisen Abstract: Introduction: Terminology and History – Palaeographic Materials – Producing a Codex – Post-production Issues – The Purpose of Palaeography and Codicology Keywords: Christ, Christian

7.1 Introduction: Terminology and History THE world of early Christianity was a world of texts, ranging from scriptural and patristic to calendars, charters, private letters, and even graffiti. Documents were written on many different kinds of materials in several different languages, primarily Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, but others as well. The study of ancient and medieval texts comprises several different scholarly disciplines. For example, texts written on durable materials such as stone, bone, metal (such as bronze and lead), pottery, or clay are subsumed under the field of epigraphy, whereas numismatics deals with the specialized category of the inscriptions and iconography of coins and medals. Characteristically, epigraphic and numismatic documents are rather short, often just several lines, as in the case of epitaphs, legal documents, or graffiti. Longer documents, such as books, were written on more perishable materials, such as papyrus, parchment, vellum, and even wax tablets. The study of these documents, including identifying their dates, classifying their different types of scripts, and reading their texts, is known generically as palaeography, from the Greek words for ‘ancient writing’. All of the palaeographic documents written in antiquity and the Middle Ages were written by hand, the Latin for which, ‘manu scripta’, gives its name to manuscripts. The discipline of Latin palaeography was established by Jean Mabillon and the Benedictine monks of St Maur in the late seventeenth century end p.140

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved for the purpose of establishing the age of Latin manuscripts based on their handwriting and other internal considerations (Mabillon 1681; Metzger 1981: 3). Shortly thereafter, the first to study Greek palaeography was the Benedictine monk Bernard de Montfaucon (1708). The study of both Greek and Latin palaeography was greatly furthered by the publication of many manuscript facsimiles beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, and of indexes of manuscript catalogues and microfilm catalogues in the twentieth century. The study of papyrus documents has its own sub-discipline, papyrology. Codicology (from codex, the name for a manuscript book), on the other hand, studies the materials from which books were constructed, the way in which books were assembled, and the manner in which texts were laid out on the page (Metzger 1981: 3; Thompson 1894: passim). And diplomatics studies the provenance (origin) of

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charters and archival documents. Taken together, codicology and palaeography have much to tell us about how early Christian writings were preserved from antiquity until the modern day.

7.2 Palaeographic Materials Some ancient documents, such as charters or personal letters, required but a page or two. But longer documents, such as books of scripture or biblical commentaries, could occupy hundreds of pages, and required some means of connecting pages together to create a liber (Greek biblion or biblos) or book. Materials that were used for bookmaking included papyrus, wax tablets, parchment, and vellum. They were fabricated into books in two formats: the scroll and the codex.

7.2.1 Writing Surfaces and their Formats (i) Papyrus The earliest form of perishable writing material was papyrus, made as early as 3,000 BCE from a species of sedge, also known as bulrush or paper reed, that grew along the banks of the Nile. In order to create writing material, the outer skin of the hollow papyrus stem was peeled off, and the inner pith was split, flattened, and cut into strips up to 15 inches long. The strips were laid side by side vertically, slightly overlapping, with another layer of strips laid horizontally, edge-to-edge on top. The two layers were moistened, pounded together, and then dried under pressure in the sun. The gum released by the fibres helped to fuse the strips into a uniform sheet. The sheets were smoothed with pumice dust and trimmed. A standard papyrus sheet, or charta, therefore, was square, the length and width, often around 10 inches, being a bit less than the length of the original strips. end p.141

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved (ii) The scroll The earliest form of book, the papyrus scroll, Greek tomos or Latin volumen (‘rolled up’), was created by gluing many papyrus sheets together, with the horizontal layers on the same side, to create rolls up to 35 feet long, the maximum manageable length. The volumen was wound around an omphalos (dowel) made of wood, metal, or bone. The side with the horizontal layer of strips, being smoother, became the writing side, or recto. The back, or verso, was usually left blank, although it too could be used if writing material ran short. The text on Greek papyrus scrolls was written with a reed pen and arranged in columns generally 2–3.5 inches wide with half-inch margins, about 18–25 letters per line and anywhere from 25 to 50 lines per column. The horizontal plant fibres provided guide lines. When a scroll was unrolled, left to right, only about four columns of text would be visible at a time. The standard size of the volumen determined the standard length of the individual sections (or ‘books’) of lengthy literary works. Multi-volume books were kept together in capsae (cylindrical containers) (Thompson 1894: 183 ff.). (iii) Wax tablets A ubiquitous writing surface was a tablet, usually wooden but sometimes ivory,

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with its surface covered with wax, often black or green. Tablets were usually strung together in pairs (diptychs) or triplets (triptychs). The wax was inscribed with a metal stylus that had a sharp point for writing on one end and a knob or flattened spatula on the other end that could be used for smoothing the wax for erasures or reuse. Tablets, being less expensive to manufacture than papyrus, were useful for rough drafts, letters, copies of documents, account books, and a multitude of other daily purposes. The satirist Horace referred to the use of tablets to write rough drafts when he commented (Satires, 1. 10. 72–3), ‘Turn your stylus often, again and again, if you are going to write anything worthy of being read.’ For lengthy documents, several diptychs could be bound together with leather thongs, creating a book-like document called a codex (or caudex), a word meaning ‘tree trunk’. (iv) Parchment and vellum The most expensive kinds of writing material were parchment and vellum, which were made from the treated skins of animals such as sheep, cattle, and goats. According to Pliny the Elder (Natural History, 13. 21), this kind of material originated when one of the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt refused to supply papyrus for the library of Pergamum. A king Eumenes, probably Eumenes II (197–160 BCE), developed writing material made from animal skins known as membrana (Latin for animal skin) or charta Pergamena (whence the word ‘parchment’). Technically, parchment was made from sheepskin, and vellum (from the Latin word vitellus, or calf) from rather tougher materials such as calf or goat skin. But both terms are end p.142

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved often used generically to refer to all types of writing materials made from animal skins, ranging from paper-thin uterine lambskin to board-hard cow skin. For the sake of convenience, the term ‘parchment’ will be used in this discussion to refer to both parchment and vellum. The production of parchment began by soaking the skins in a lime bath to remove fat and loose flesh and to loosen the hair. A skin then was stretched on a wooden frame and scraped with a lunellum, a crescent-shaped knife, to smooth it, to remove the hair and any other adherences, and to keep the skin supple as it dried. Once the skin was dry, the two sides, and especially the hair side, were rubbed smooth with pumice. The same process could make the skin thinner and stretch it out farther. The flesh side, which was more absorbent, then was dressed with pounce (from pumex, or pumice), gum sandarac mixed with pumice, to make it less absorbent so that the ink would not run. The hair side, on the other hand, was pounced with chalk and pumice to whiten it. Pounce was also used to reduce greasiness. In spite of this treatment, the hair and flesh sides often could be differentiated: the flesh side tended to be white and a bit concave (it shrank more), whereas the hair side often was yellowish and showed traces of the hair follicles. The treated skins were then trimmed to make large rectangular sheets, or folia, with the leftover scraps being used for labels, ties, or even tiny pages. Thick skins could even be split into two layers, and folia also could be dyed for special purposes. (v) The codex Parchment books were constructed differently from papyrus books. Parchment sheets were stacked in layers, folded in two, and sewn together along the fold, creating a codex with four times as many pages (front and back) as original

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parchment sheets. The word codex gives its name to codicology, which is the study of books in codex form. Codex also gives its name to ‘codification’, for this was the book format that eventually was used for large collections of written texts. By the first century BCE, parchment codex notebooks were being used, like codices made from wax tablets, for rough drafts, keeping accounts, and so on. In the following century, the codex came into increasing use as a means of copying literary works. Each group of folded pages with a common internal fold is known as a ‘quire’ or ‘gathering’. Early codices were of a single-quire format, but the bigger the book, the more clumsy this method was; fatter books were liable to crack at the spine, and the outer pages had to be much wider than the inner ones. Thus, it was eventually found more practical to bind several quires into books of whatever length one desired. The sixteen-page length, the ‘quaternion’ (tetrad es in Greek), made from four folded sheets, became standard; although one also encounters quires of other sizes, ranging from binions (two sheets) and ternions (three sheets) on up. Beginning in late antiquity, the bottom of the last page of each quire was often marked with a sequential quire number, or ‘signature’, for example, ‘Q III’, or ‘the third quaternion’. These numbers end p.143

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved facilitated binding, and also are very helpful in reassembling books that have come apart or survive only in a fragmentary state. Each page in a codex has a front (top) side, the ‘recto’ (on the right side of a pair of pages) and a back (bottom) side, the ‘verso’ (on the left of a pair of pages). Sheets were initially numbered by folia, often in the upper right corner of the recto side. Thus, the pages on the front and back of each leaf have the same folio number: the recto page is given the superscript ‘r’ and the verso the superscript ‘v’. Only later did it become common to number individual pages. The pages of parchment codices were organized so that each spread (a set of facing pages) consisted of flesh or hair sides of the parchment sheets, so that like-tinted pages faced each other. (vi) Paper Paper was not used at all during the early Christian period. The Arabs learned to manufacture paper from cotton, linen, or even silk fibres from the Chinese by the mid-eighth century, but it did not begin to be used in Europe until the late eleventh century, in Spain. Thence its use passed gradually into the rest of Europe, where it began to be used for books as of about 1400 CE. Paper books were almost invariably in the codex format. After the spread of printing and the need for bulk quantities of writing material, parchment was largely replaced by paper, remaining in use only for high-quality books or other specialized uses, such as modern ‘sheepskins’, a word still applied to school diplomas.

7.2.2 Predominance of Parchment and the Codex Format (i) Choice of writing material Papyrus remained the writing material of choice until into the fourth century. It was relatively inexpensive, produced in large quantities, and readily available thanks to the freely functioning Roman trade networks. But the utility of parchment became increasingly clear for several reasons. Papyrus was available only from Egypt, and, while initially very sturdy, it became very friable with age. It did not stand up to damp climates or hard use. For example, in the late fifth century a friend of Ruricius of Limoges wrote to him: As you directed, I have

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found the saint Augustine... It is a papyrus book and insufficiently strong to bear mistreatment, because, as you know, papyrus is quickly consumed by age. Read it, if you wish, and copy it (Ep. Litterae sanctitatis). As a consequence of its perishable nature, most extant papyrus documents come from the sands of Egypt; only a very few survive from elsewhere. Parchment, on the other hand, could be made anywhere, was rewritable, and was very durable. Although liable to fire, mildew, and mice, it was otherwise virtually indestructible. As of the fourth century, there began a transition from the use of end p.144

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved papyrus to that of parchment, especially for documents that would receive heavy use. Some resisted the change. Galen, for example, claimed that parchment's glare caused eye-strain (Opera 3, 18). But, gradually, parchment replaced papyrus as the writing material of choice, especially in the western world. Availability considerations also came into play. By the fifth century, with the de facto split of the Roman Empire into eastern and western halves and a rise in Mediterranean piracy, papyrus was less and less available in the West. As a result, an increasingly large number of original parchment documents survive from the fifth century and later. The vast majority of these are church-related. (ii) Choice of book format At the same time that parchment was superseding papyrus, the codex format was also gaining in popularity. The codex had several advantages over the scroll: it could be written on both sides and still have the pages stay in sequence; it made cross-referencing and paging back and forth easier; it was more portable, and it was easier to store on shelves. Whereas the scroll was well suited to accessing a sequential group of pages, the codex was better for random access among passages scattered throughout a book. For Christian purposes, the codex was clearly superior. In the church, the codex facilitated flipping easily from one scriptural passage to another, a process that would have necessitated a clumsy and time-consuming rolling and unrolling of a 35-foot scroll. It has also been suggested that a desire to distance themselves from the Jewish scroll also may have been a reason why early Christians preferred the codex format: in Christian iconography, the Hebrew prophets are represented holding scrolls and the evangelists holding codices. By the second century CE the codex had replaced the scroll in Christian circles. During the fourth century the triumph of Christianity also encouraged the general replacement of the scroll by the codex. The emperor Constantine, for example, requested Eusebius of Caesarea ‘to order fifty copies of the sacred Scriptures, to be written on prepared parchment in a legible manner, and in a convenient, portable form, by professional transcribers’ (Vit. Const. 4. 36). (iii) Exceptions The papyrus codex and parchment rotulus Generally speaking, papyrus was used in scroll format, and parchment in codex format, but there were exceptions. Parchment was also used for scrolls, as in the Pergamum Library and in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And papyrus was adapted to the codex format, although its loss of suppleness over time made it increasingly difficult to turn the pages. In papyrus codices, horizontally and vertically oriented pages were organized to face each other. end p.145

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved The use of the scroll, meanwhile, did not die out completely, but survived, as the rotulus, into the Middle Ages. Rather than being made of sheets glued side by side, the rotulus was created by gluing or sewing parchment sheets top to bottom, and was unrolled vertically rather than horizontally. It was used primarily for storing records that were suited to this kind of format, such as genealogies and pedigrees, year-by-year chronicles, or lists of saints. Exultet rolls contained liturgical texts on one side and illustrations, upside down, on the other, so that when the texts were read in church, the congregation would be able to see the illustration on the other side. Exotic materials In addition to the use of papyrus, wax tablets, and parchment, other, more exotic materials were used for documents that palaeographers occasionally have to deal with. These include wood, as manifested in the Vindolanda tablets and the Tablettes Albertini, and slate, as seen in documents originating in Visigothic Spain.

7.3 Producing a Codex Most manuscripts produced in the early Christian period and later were not original works but rather copies of earlier works, such as books of scripture or works of esteemed patristic authors. Creating a manuscript from scratch was a time-, labour-, and resource-intensive business.

7.3.1 Personnel During The Early Christian Centuries, Documents Could Be Written Either By Professional Copyists (Scribes) Or, Very Often, By The Person Who Intended To Use The Document. Until The Third Century, It Was Common For Christians To Copy Their Own Documents. According To Eusebius Of Caesarea (Hist. Eccl. 6. 23; Haines-Eitzen 2000, Ch. 2), For Example, Origen Used As Copyists ‘Girls Who Were Skilled In Elegant Writing’. There Was A Great Demand For Copies Of Christian Texts, Exacerbated By Spates Of Persecutions When Scriptures Were Confiscated By Government Authorities, Resulting In The Need To Re-Create, Re-Copy, And Re-Circulate New Copies. But Once Christianity Became Politically Acceptable In The Fourth Century, And Increasingly Large Numbers Of Well-To-Do Individuals Converted, The Production And Reproduction Of Christian Texts Became A Major Occupation Of Professional And Amateur Scribes Alike. A Professional Scribe (Scriba, Notarius, Or Amanuensis) Was Paid According To The Quality Of The Work And By The Number Of Lines. During The Middle Ages, Much Of The Copying end p.146

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Of Christian Texts Took Place In The Scriptoria (Writing Rooms) Of Monasteries And Episcopal Chanceries, And Was Performed By Ecclesiastical Scribes Skilled In Manuscript Production. The Production Of An Entire Codex Was A Time-Consuming Affair Requiring Personnel With Many Different Skills, Including Not Only Scribes, But Also Rubricators (Heading-Makers), Illuminators, Binders, Lectors (Readers), Correctors, And Librarians.

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7.3.2 Pre-production Issues When a codex book was created, several considerations had to be borne in mind before the copying process could begin. How large would the pages be? How many pages of writing material would be required? The number of pages would be determined both by the size of the page and by the size of the margins on each page (wide margins would leave room for comments and additions, small margins would make most efficient use of the parchment). The gatherings were arranged ahead of time, but were not actually sewn together until after the pages had been written, meaning that much planning had to be given to how the pages would be laid out. Decisions had to be made about the placement of text, headings, and illustrations, and about the number of columns, lines per page, and characters per line. (i) Size considerations Parchment codices were made in standardized sizes that were based upon the size of a sheep. A single sheet created from an average-sized sheepskin was a folio. Folding a folio in half created a bi-folium of four pages, front and back. Gatherings made from bi-folia are said to be in ‘folio’ format. Smaller-sized books could be created from cutting folia in half, and then folding these half-folia. This created books in ‘quarto’ format (four leaves from each folio sheet). Likewise, quarto sheets could be cut in half and folded to create books in ‘octavo’ format (eight leaves per folio sheet). Because, on average, all sheep were a standard size, ‘folio’ (roughly 12 by 19 inches), ‘quarto’ (9 1/2 by 12 inches), and ‘octavo’ (6 by 9 1/2 inches) formats likewise were (and continue to be) of similar sizes everywhere. Even smaller page sizes could be created by making additional folds, or just by using parchment scraps. The choice of which size to use was often determined by the type of document being copied. Books considered to be of greater importance, or for public use, usually merited a larger format. For example, the largest extant early biblical manuscript, the fourth-century Greek Codex Sinaiticus, weighs in at a whopping 43 by 38 cm (17.2 by 15.2 inches). Other extant fifth- and sixth-century biblical manuscripts average about 27 by 20 cm (11 by 8 inches). Pocket editions for private use, on the other hand, could be tiny: a fifth-century Greek gospel measures only 67 mm (2.6 inches) end p.147

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved on a side, and the written space of a small Latin copy of the gospel of John of c. 500 CE measures only 71 by 51 mm (2.8 by 2.0 inches) (McGurk 1994: 7–9). (ii) Availability of writing material The actual production of a manuscript book began with the collection of a sufficient amount of writing material. A large book in folio format, such as a complete Bible, could require 1,000 pages, or 250 folia, that is, the skins of 250 sheep. This made book production a very expensive business. Palimpsests If fresh parchment was not available, as was often the case, then obsolete or worn-out books could be recycled. The existing writing was laboriously washed (with a mixture of oat bran and milk) or scraped (with powdered pumice) off the pages, and a new layer of writing laid down atop the old. This created a ‘palimpsest’ (from the Greek, meaning ‘scraped again’). During the sixth and

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seventh centuries in particular, there was a great trade in reused parchment in the Latin West. The cannibalization of old manuscripts for writing material became so endemic that Byzantine church councils forbade the destruction of good copies of scriptural or patristic documents for this purpose. But the practice continued. Many of the literary works of classical antiquity survive only as palimpsests, such as a fourth-century copy of Cicero's De republica, written over in the seventh century by Augustine's On the Psalms (Vaticanus Latinus 5757; See Fig. 7.1). Some documents even survive as double palimpsests, as in the case of a fifth-century (or later) copy of Granius Licinianus which was overwritten in the sixth century (or later) with a Latin grammatical treatise and then overwritten in the eleventh century with a Syriac translation of the sermons of John Chrysostom (British Library, Add. MS 17212). In the nineteenth century, scholars seeking to read palimpsests attacked (and often destroyed) them with chemicals such as tincture of gall or ammonium hydrosulphate. More recently, non-destructive methods, such as ultraviolet light or digital imaging, have proved more successful in reading the underwriting. (iii) Surface preparation: ruling To enable a scribe to align the text, a parchment sheet was ruled horizontally (ruling lines) and vertically (bounding lines) with impressed lines made with a blunt metal or bone stylus drawn along a rule, a method known as ‘hardpoint’. In order to duplicate ruling lines within a manuscript and avoid re-measuring every leaf, it was common to place pin-pricks through a stack of leaves and then to ‘connect the dots’ on each leaf. As of the twelfth century, ruling lines were also made with a metal point, a writing implement with a metal tip (such as lead) that left trace marks on a document. Ink was also used for ruling later in the Middle Ages. end p.148

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Fig. 7.1 Palimpsest of Cicero, De Republica. The large fourth-century uncial letters of the Cicero text, the primary script, lie underneath the seventh-century letters of the secondary script, Augustine's On the Psalms.

7.3.3 Writing the Text (i) Writing implements and inks In antiquity, the writing implements for both papyrus and parchment were a reed pen (Greek kalamos, Latin calamus) and black ink. In the sixth century the reed was generally replaced, especially for writing on parchment, by the quill pen. The quill was taken from the long flight feather of a bird, often a goose. Indeed, the word pen derives from penna, Latin for feather. The nib, or point of the pen, could be cut with a knife to produce different kinds of lines for different kinds of writing: thin points were generally better for informal cursive scripts, and thicker ones for formal book hands. Black ink was initially made from a mixture of carbon (often obtained from soot), gum, and water. After about 300 CE, black ink made by adding green vitriol (ferrous sulfate) to tannin obtained from gall nuts (often oak galls) and carbon came into use. The sometimes corrosive action caused by the tannic acid and the oxidation of the iron gave ink its Latin name, encaustum (‘burnt in’), a reference also to its indelibility. This permanent, waterresistant ink, which over time faded to a rust brown colour, became the standard European black ink until the nineteenth end p.149

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Fig. 7.2. Capitalis quadrata used in a fourth- or fifth-century copy of Vergil's Aeneid. century. Red ink, made from cinnabar (mercury sulphide) or minium (lead oxide, or ‘red lead’), was used for titles and headings, which had the generic name ‘rubrics’ (from Latin rubrica, or red earth). For deluxe documents, purple (from the shell of the murex), gold, or silver ink could be used on purple-dyed parchment to create a codex purpureus, such as the sixth-century Rossano Gospels, or the Codex Argenteus, a sixth-century Gothic Bible. Painted illuminations and historiated initials (large initial letters containing a painting) could be applied with brushes made from frayed reeds or animal hairs. Paints were made from animal, vegetable, and mineral compounds mixed with a binding medium such as egg white. Along with red, made from the minerals discussed above, blue could be made from azurite, and green from malachite (both forms of copper carbonate), yellow from saffron, and white from white lead (lead carbonate). Some of these compounds were quite toxic, and great care had to be taken in their use. (ii) Sections of a codex The contents of a codex had several sections in addition to the actual text. Some manuscripts were preceded by a table of contents, either of different works in a single manuscript or of the sections of a single work. Individual documents and sections within works were often preceded by a heading (title) and descriptive lemma, often written in red letters (rubrics). The first words of a text proper are known as the incipit, and the concluding words as the explicit. After the explicit sometimes comes a colophon, or subscription, personal comments of the scribe perhaps giving his or her name, the date, or expressing relief at having finally completed the task: e.g. ‘Finit. Gratias Deo’. Marginal or intertextual notes known as scholia (or marginalia) could be added at any time during or after the initial writing process. end p.150

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Fig. 7.3. Rustic capitals used in the Carmen de bello Actiaco, pre–79 CE from Herculaneum. Note the slashes used as paragraph punctuation.

(iii) Writing the text Scripts One of the primary activities of palaeographers is the identification of different types of scripts, which not only allows a text to be read, but also, very often, helps a text to be dated and localized. In Greek and Latin antiquity, there were initially two basic types of script: block capital and cursive. Capitals (or maiuscules, or ‘upper case’) were derived from the block letters used in inscriptions, and were used for formal documents, such as literary texts, intended to be permanent. They were thus the first ‘book hands’. Capital letters were inscribed (with few exceptions) as separate letters between two actual or imaginary parallel lines so that all the letters are the same height. The most severe style of capital script, known as capitalis quadrata, monumentalis, or elegans, was modelled directly on lapidary capitals, and used curved lines only where the letter form requires them (as in Latin O or S), often with serifs. Quadrata was used for the most deluxe editions (Fig. 7.2). Capitalis rustica, or rustic capital, on the other hand, could be written rather more quickly, with rather slender, wavy strokes (Fig. 7.3; Thompson 1894: 183). Cursive, or ‘running’', style, on the other hand, was a shorthand way of writing the capital letters, and was used for everyday, non-literary documents, such as letters, accounts, and receipts (Fig. 7.4). It used ascenders that extended above the bodies of the letters and descenders that fell below. It was varied in style and notoriously illegible, as attested in a passage from Plautus's play the Pseudolus (1. 25–30) from the late third century BCE: PSEUDOLUS. By Pollux, I believe that no one but the Sibyl could read these letters; no one else could interpret them. CALIDORUS. Why do you speak negatively about these lovely letters and lovely tablets written with a lovely hand? PSEUDOLUS. Or, I beg you by Hercules, do they reflect the hands of a chicken? For certainly a chicken has written them. Cursive capitals developed into miniscule letters (lower case) called ‘new Roman cursive’ during the Roman imperial period (Fig. 7.5). Miniscule cursive made use end p.151

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Fig. 7.4 Cursive capitals from a wall inscription from Pompeii, first century CE, with lines from Ovid (Amores, 1. 8. 97) and Propertius (4. 47), beginning ‘SVRDA SIT ORANTI TVA’. of ligatures (connected letters), and can be even more difficult to read than cursive capitals. Around the third century CE, a new form of book hand, uncial, developed (Fig. 7.6). It was comprised primarily of maiuscules that made greater use of rounded forms (as seen in the m) along with some rather miniscule forms (as with e, h, and q), both of which made the writing process quicker and more efficient.

Fig. 7.5 New Roman cursive used in an imperial rescript on papyrus dated to the fifth century, beginning ‘portionem ipsi debitam resarcire’.

end p.152

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Fig. 7.6 An uncial copy of the book of Acts, chapter 28, from the mid-sixth century. Uncial then remained a standard Latin book hand until the eighth century CE and even later. Toward the end of the fifth century, another book hand, known either as half-uncial or semi-uncial, developed (Fig. 7.7). It retained some uncial characteristics, such as rounded letter forms, the capital letters F, N, and T, and the uncial forms for E, H, and U/V. But the other letters were miniscules, drawn from the cursive tradition, with ascenders and descenders. There was also greater use of ligatures, such as N-T or L-I combinations, all of which made for greater writing speed.

Fig. 7.7 Half-uncial copy of the In Constantium imperatorem of Hilary of Poitiers, dating to 509/510 CE, with quaternion marking at bottom right. end p.153

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Fig. 7.8 Greek cursive papyrus dated to 355 CE; the manumission of a slave. Greek scripts developed similarly to Latin. The same capital (maiuscule) letters used in inscriptions were also used on papyrus, although not to nearly as great an extent as in Latin. With a few exceptions, Greek cursive used the Greek maiuscule letters, making use of ligatures that allowed the pen to remain on the page (Fig. 7.8). A few letters, such as alpha, took a miniscule form. Greek cursive was used not only for administrative documents, but also for literary texts to a greater extent than in Latin. Greek uncial, with rounded letters, was introduced during the Hellenistic period (third century BCE and later), the most characteristic forms being the lower-case alpha, delta, epsilon, mu, xi, lunate sigma, and omega (Fig. 7.9). Uncial then served as the primary Greek book hand until the appearance of Greek miniscule in the ninth century, which also used the characteristic Greek accents and breathing marks (Fig. 7.10). The weight of tradition and authority of the Roman Empire created a uniformity of scripts throughout the Greek and Latin worlds. But after the fall of the Roman Empire, a great diversity of scripts appeared in the Latin West. Although uncial and semi-uncial remained the standard book hands, various kinds of cursive evolved in the different national areas, including Visigothic in Spain, Merovingian in France, Insular in Anglo-Saxon England, and Beneventan in Lombard Italy. In the Carolingian period (eighth-ninth centuries), a standardized miniscule emerged, Caroline miniscule, which then replaced uncial as the standard book hand, although uncial continued to be used as a display hand for headings and titles (Fig. 7.11). Subsequently, in the late eleventh century, a group of scripts generically referred to as ‘Gothic’ (a term also used to refer to a new architectural style) end p.154

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Fig. 7.9 Greek uncial from the Codex Sinaiticus, a copy of the Septuagint dating to the fourth century CE and one of the two oldest surviving copies of the Greek Bible. emerged in northern France. And even later, during the Renaissance, a rounded ‘humanistic’ script also was used as a book hand. It eventually developed into the modern ‘roman’ typeface, whereas the angular cursive used for business documents developed into modern ‘italic’ type. Writing and reading aids The writing and reading of manuscripts was facilitated by the use of stichometry, colometry, punctuation, and abbreviations. a. Stichometry and colometry Greek and Latin manuscripts were written in scripta continua, without any spaces between the words. Various methods were introduced that permitted texts to be broken down into smaller units, in order to create smaller logical units, to facilitate a more euphonius delivery, and simply to count lines and navigate through the text. In antiquity, the length of literary works was measured by a unit called the ‘stichos’, the length of an average Homeric or Vergilian hexameter line, about 16 syllables or 36 letters. The total number of stichoi was often noted at the end of a work. The count of stichoi was used to determine a scribe's wages and the price of a book; to allow referencing of different sections of books (which were numbered in the margin in units of 50 or 100); and to help ensure against later additions or deletions (rather like a computer parity check). Josephus, for example, claimed that his Antiquities of the Jews contained 60,000 stichoi. The use of the end p.155

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Fig. 7.10 Greek miniscule, a tenth-century copy of Thucydides. stichos (Latin versus) in the marketplace is attested in Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices of 302 CE that also gave the respective values of book hand and cursive (Edictum de pretiis 6. 41–3): ‘For a copyist, for a hundred lines (versus) of best writing, 25 denarii; for a hundred lines of next-quality writing, 20 denarii; for a tablet-writer, for the writing of a letter or of account books, for a hundred lines, 10 denarii.’

Fig. 7.11 Caroline miniscule, the Rule of St Benedict, from the ninth century. end p.156

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Fig. 7.12 A section of the seventh-century uncial Codex Amiatinus, the best extant example of the Vulgate, showing divisions into cola and commata. When copying verse texts, it was common to begin stanzas or lines with a capital letter and often on a separate line, a practice that was also used in the biblical poetic books (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon). A related system of parsing lengthy texts into smaller units, and an alternative to using punctuation marks, is known as colometry, which consisted of breaking texts up into cola and commata, sense-lines of clauses and phrases that assisted the reader not only in understanding a text but also in inserting pauses and inflections in the appropriate places (Fig. 7.12). This system was utilized in the Vulgate by Jerome, who observed: No one seeing the Prophets set out in meter would think that they were constrained by the Hebrew language, and he would have a rather similar opinion about the Psalms, or the works of Solomon, but one would see that which generally happens in Demosthenes and Cicero, who surely wrote in prose and not in verses, that they are written in cola and commata. We, likewise, planning for the utility of readers, have defined a new interpretation with a new kind of writing. (Praefatio in Isaiam, PL 28. 771) On a manuscript page, cola began at the left margin and commata were indented a space or two. The disadvantage of this system is that it was rather wasteful of manuscript space. b. Punctuation Another way of breaking up a continuous text involved the use of punctuation marks. Said to have been invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium (c.200 BCE) as an aid for barbarians trying to learn Greek, they were intended to assist readers in parsing a text during oral delivery. His marks consisted of a point inserted at different levels of a text line to represent the length of a pause. But end p.157

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved this system was not extensively implemented. During the early Christian period, Greek manuscripts indicated the end of a passage by the insertion of a space or

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of a paragraphos or paragraph mark (such as a slash), by the enlarging of the initial letter of a new passage, or by extending the first full line of a new passage into the left margin. Early Latin texts, especially epigraphical texts, sometimes used an interpunct, a raised dot, to separate words, a practice that generally went out of use during the imperial period. Early Latin manuscripts also sometimes left a space to indicate the transition from one passage to the next, and the paragraphos mark (a slash in the De bello Actiaco) to separate paragraphs was also used. Otherwise, punctuation marks were slow to develop. In uncial manuscripts, a medial point was sometimes used to indicate a period (long pause), and a colon the end of a chapter. In the mid-seventh century, according to Isidore of Seville, punctuation marks akin to those of Aristophanes were used by Latin writers to mark out the cola and commata: ‘Punctuation is a form for distinguishing meaning through the use of cola, commata, and periods.... The first mark is called the subdistinctio, the same as the comma. The media distinctio follows it, the same as the cola. The ultima distinctio, which closes the entire thought, is the same as the period’ (Etym. 1. 20). The comma marked a place to take a breath, the cola a logical division of a thought, and the period the end of a thought (sentence). The marks were indicated by a punctus (point) placed at the bottom, middle, and top of the line respectively. By the same time other marks also were in use, such as a semicolon for a longer pause, and a virgule (‘ ’) for a period, or full stop. The question mark appeared in the ninth century in both Greek and Latin texts (Thompson 1894: 70–1). These methods for parsing texts ultimately gave rise to the modern division of scripture into verses. c. Abbreviations and shorthand Several methods were used to save space in a manuscript. In Greek manuscripts, for example, letters were sometimes superposed one above the other. Nearly all Greek and Latin scripts made use of some degree of abbreviation. In Christian texts, the earliest and most commonly abbreviated words were the nomina sacra, or sacred words, which were contracted so that only the initial and final letter or letters were printed. In Greek, for example, theos was abbreviated ths, whereas in Latin, dominus was abbreviated dns. A special sign was the Tetragrammaton, an abbreviation of the name of God based on the four Hebrew letters spelling the name of God. For marginal notations in particular, Tironian notes, a form of tachygraphy (shorthand) used in the Roman period, continued to be used in the Middle Ages. Tironian notes were a form of linked, compressed cursive combined with abbreviations (such as p for primus). end p.158

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7.4 Post-production Issues Once a manuscript had been produced, its history was only beginning. It then had to be preserved, used, and its contents transmitted to future generations.

7.4.1 Binding Once a lengthy document had been copied, the gatherings were usually bound together, often but not always with boards on the front and back for protective purposes. The gatherings were sewn on to leather cords perpendicular to the spine of the book. For a permanent binding, the loose ends of these cords were then threaded through holes drilled into boards on front and back and secured by pegs. The boards and spine were then covered by damp leather, folded and glued over the edges of the boards (the ‘turn-ins’), that dried to a tight fit, with the

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cords showing through on the spine. A pastedown leaf, often made from fragments of discarded manuscripts, could be pasted on the inside of the boards for cosmetic purposes. It was also common to insert a guard leaf, often cannibalized from a discarded manuscript, between the boards and the manuscript, and to use discarded manuscript scraps in other parts of the binding as well. A simpler ‘limp binding’ of parchment or fabric could also be used, but did not protect the volume nearly as well.

7.4.2 Storage and preservation Books represented wealth, not only because they were very labour-intensive but also because of the material resources used in their construction. As treasures, books were often stored with the other valuables of a church, monastery, or household. In antiquity, the great libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum assembled myriads of papyrus scrolls. Many of these works eventually made their way, in one form or another, to Constantinople during the Byzantine period. Greek patristic and classical manuscripts were also preserved in libraries such as those of Mt Sinai and Mt Athos. In the fifteenth century many works of Greek antiquity and Christianity then travelled to the West before and after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 CE. The primary repositories of books during the western Middle Ages were monastic libraries, the largest of which could contain more than a thousand volumes. Some of the most significant early monastic and cathedral libraries, which served both as copying centres and repositories, included Vivarium, Nonantola, Monte Cassino, and Bobbio in Italy; St Gallen in Switzerland; Luxeuil, Fleury, Cluny, Lyon, St-Riquier, Tours, and Corbie in France; Fulda, Reichenau, Corvey, Lorsch, and Sponheim in Germany; and Iona, Lindesfarne, and Jarrow in the British end p.159

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Isles. Were it not for these scriptoria and libraries, most of the literature of classical antiquity and the early Christian period would not have survived.

7.5 The Purpose of Palaeography and Codicology Not a single ancient or early Christian text survives in an original (or ‘autograph’) copy. Even papyrus documents are copies. Except for the case of a codex unicus, a copy of an ancient work that survives only in a single copy, ancient works survive in multiple manuscript copies. Different manuscript copies of the same text invariably have different readings for some of the same words or passages. How is the scholar to know which reading is the ‘correct’ one? The primary purpose of palaeography and codicology as disciplines is to assist in establishing the earliest and most authoritative versions of ancient texts.

7.5.1 Technical Considerations Much of a palaeographer's work is very technical. A knowledge of scripts and abbreviations can do much to help to transcribe (establish a full, unabbreviated text) and date a manuscript, for even scripts with a long lifetime, such as uncial, exhibit different characteristics at different times. The date of a manuscript can also be established by patterns of abbreviation and punctuation, by folio and quaternion markings, by binding type, and by a multitude of other considerations. Palaeographers also identify changes of hands in manuscript copying or the later appearance of new hands, as by later correctors or commentators, for each scribe had his or her own unique style of handwriting.

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Even from fragmentary pages, a codicologist can often estimate the length of the line and number of lines per page in a manuscript, especially if margins are preserved, and this in turn can help to reconstruct the length of a lost text. A palaeographer can also help to identify forged documents.

7.5.2 Textual Analysis and Criticism The actual work of creating modern editions of ancient works lies in the sphere of textual analysis and criticism. Textual critics attempt to re-create, as much as possible, the original texts that lie behind the surviving manuscripts, and can take different approaches in doing so. One school of thought attempts to reconstruct end p.160

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved the original ‘edition’ of a work, however that is defined (ancient works were not ‘published’ in the modern sense, and from the moment of their composition most ancient texts were in a constant state of revision); another school of thought attempts to establish what the author intended to be the authoritative text. The primary problem that confronts textual critics is that surviving manuscripts almost certainly contain words or passages that were not in the original text (known as the ‘archetype’). In the case where there are many manuscript versions of the same document (the New Testament, for example, survives in more than 5,300 Greek manuscripts alone dating from the third to the sixteenth century), textual critics attempt to classify manuscripts in order to determine which are the most reliable. One method for assigning manuscripts to the same class is by noting common errors that appear in all of them and must have originated in a single exemplar (original copy). Textual critics then create a stemma, or family, of manuscript classes that allows them to postulate an archetype from which all of the surviving manuscripts of a text have descended. Sometimes, or even often, the oldest manuscript does not preserve the most authoritative text, for a much later manuscript might in fact preserve a copy of a very early manuscript. The archetype is not necessarily the ‘original’ edition, but is the closest that editors can get to it based on the manuscript evidence. Textual critics also often suggest emendations to a surviving text that are not preserved in any of the manuscript readings, but which seem to an editor to fit the literary, grammatical, or historical context of the text better than the manuscript readings. (i) Transmission and errors Palaeographers can assist textual critics not only by deciphering manuscript scripts, but also by identifying ways in which errors can creep into manuscript copies. The very copying process introduced many opportunities for error, and the proliferation of copies over the centuries created opportunities for the propagation of erroneous readings. Unintentional or accidental errors could occur in many ways. There were several kinds of sight errors. Letters with a similar appearance (e.g. in Greek uncial, epsilon, theta, omicron, and lunate sigma; or gamma, tau, and pi) could be confused. In ‘permutation’, a scribe transposed letters, syllables, or words because of bad light, bad eyesight, or a hard-to-read copy. Parablepsis (‘glancing to the side’) occurred when the scribe's eye did not return to the correct place on the page. This could lead to the error of haplography (omission) resulting from homoteleuton (two adjacent lines ending with the same word or letters). On the other hand, ‘dittography’ (duplication) occurred when a scribe re-copied the same

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section of a manuscript. Memory lapses during the split second between reading and copying could result in the substitution of synonyms or variations in the sequence of words. Other unintentional errors resulted from hearing errors, when a text was being dictated end p.161

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved by a lector or when a scribe was reading it aloud. Both Greek and Latin had many homophones, different letters or combinations of letters that, when read, sounded alike, such as (in Greek) omega and omicron or omicron-upsilon and upsilon. The error of ‘itacism’ resulted in Greek because, as of the fourth century, the vowels eta, iota, and upsilon, and the diphtongs ei, oi, and ui, were all pronounced like long e in English. Changes to an original text could also be intentional or purposeful, introduced by a scribe who wanted to improve a text. Scribes sometimes attempted to correct spelling or grammar. Doing so could result in hypercorrection, the ‘correcting’ of non-existent mistakes, such as adding an ‘h’ to the beginning of a word on the assumption that an unpronounced ‘h’ had dropped out. This kind of error was mentioned by Jerome in a letter to a friend who had sent several scribes to copy Jerome's works: ‘If you encounter any errors, you ought to blame the copyists, who write not what they see but what they understand, and when they attempt to emend the errors of others they display their own’ (Ep. 71. 5). In Christian manuscripts, another kind of intentional alteration could involve making doctrinal or theological ‘corrections’ to an objectionable passage. (ii) Additional aids to textual critics Documents in other languages Documents were also copied in a multitude of other scripts in many other languages, too numerous to be considered in detail here, but which include Syriac, Samaritan, Coptic, Old Nubian, Meroitic, Ethiopic, Aramaic, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, and Gothic, whose testimony can often augment the evidence of the Greek, Hebrew, and Latin manuscripts. Syriac, Coptic, and Samaritan manuscripts, for example, can preserve alternative scriptural traditions. And Arabic manuscripts, in particular, preserve translations of Greek documents that no longer survive. New discoveries One of the most exciting aspects of the palaeographer's work is the possibility of the discovery of new texts to study. Previously unknown texts can be found in the bindings of medieval manuscripts (such as part of the second book of De reditu suo of Rutilius Namatianus); in palimpsests (such as the new letters of Augustine); preserved in Renaissance or early modern copies of now-lost documents (such as the new Augustinian sermons); or as ancient texts, usually papyri (such as the Dead Sea Scrolls), preserved in the desiccated climates of Egypt and Palestine. (iii) Future directions Many opportunities for new work in palaeography and codicology as related to the history of early Christianity are offered by the application of computer and end p.162

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© Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved scientific technology. Potentially exciting use of scientific analyses has shed light on the development of early biblical and patristic texts. Modern scientific methods permit the evaluation and processing of existing and newly discovered texts that are in a bad state of preservation–-the recently processed Judas Gospel, which had disintegrated into more than 1,000 fragments and for which radiocarbon dating was used to prove that the papyrus on which it was written dated to between 220 and 340 CE, being a good case in point. Another example of the results that can follow from meticulous detective work and restoration is provided by the recent edition of Philodemus's ‘On Piety’, re-created from a carbonized papyrus scroll found in Pompeii. New techniques of restoring and preserving ancient documents promise to make other biblical and patristic texts available to the scholarly community as well. Manuscript pages and fragments can now be preserved using ultra-high resolution digital images that can also be made available on the internet, so as to make documents much more accessible than in the past. Once texts have been digitized, they can be categorized and analysed in any number of ways. Computer software can be used to identify similar scripts used in different manuscripts. Manuscript tables of contents can be collated and compared to identify similar transmission processes. Thousands of texts can be compared electronically for use in studies of authorship. Electronic publication venues, such as the ‘Digital Medievalist’, http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ , permit the dissemination of information about new advances in digital techniques to a worldwide audience. Techniques of biological research are also beginning to be used to provide new insights into ancient and medieval texts. Computer programs used to chart the evolution of changes in DNA structure can also be applied to creating evolutionary trees of manuscript text transmission. And, most recently, it has even been suggested that DNA analysis can be applied to identify the source of and interrelationships among ancient manuscript materials derived from animal hides. Bibliography

ALAND, J., and ALAND, B. (1989), Der Text des Neuen Testaments: Einführung in die wissenschaftlichen Ausgaben sowie in Theorie und Praxis der modernen Textkritik, 2nd edn. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft); 1st edn., trans. E. F. Rhodes, The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 1987). BARBOUR, R. (1981), Greek Literary Hands, A.D. 400–1600 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). BEIT-ARIE, M. (1993), The Makings of the Medieval Hebrew Book: Studies in Palaeography and Codicology (Jerusalem: Magnes Press). BISCHOFF, B. (1986), Paläographie des römischen Altertums und des abendlandischen Mittelalters, 2nd edn. (Berlin: E. Schmidt; first published 1979); trans. Daibhi o Croinin and end p.163

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D. Ganz, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). BOYLE, L. (1984), Medieval Latin Palaeography: A Bibliographical Introduction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). BRASWELL, L. Nichols (1981), Western Manuscripts from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance: A Handbook (New York: Garland Publishing Co.). BROWN, M. P. (1990), A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). CAPPELLI, A. (1985), Lexicon abbreviaturarum (Milan: Hoepli, 1912); trans. D. Heimann and R. Kay as The Elements of Abbreviations in Medieval Latin Palaeography (Milan: Hoepli). CAVALLO, G. (1967), Ricerche sulla maiuscola biblica (Florence: Le Monnier).

—— MAEHLER, H. (1987), Greek Bookhands of the Early Byzantine Period, A.D. 300–800 (London: University of London, Institute of Classical Studies).

DE

MONTFAUCON, B. (1708), Palaeographia Graeca (Paris).

DEROLEZ, A. (1979), Les catalogues de bibliotheques (Turnhout: Brepols).

DILLER, A. (1983), Studies in Greek Manuscript Tradition (Amsterdam: Hakkert).

GRONINGEN, B. A. van (1963), Short Manual of Greek Palaeography, 3rd rev. edn. (Leiden: Sijthoff). HAINES-EITZEN, K. (2000), Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (New York: Oxford University Press).

HARLFINGER, D. (1980) (ed.), Griechische Kodikologie und Textüberlieferung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft). HUNGER, H. (1954), Studien zur griechischen Paläographie (Vienna: Hollinek).

LEWIS, N. (1974), Papyrus in Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

LOWE, E. A. (1934–66) (eds.), Codices latini antiquiores: A Palaeographical Guide to Latin Manuscripts prior to the Ninth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

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MABILLON, J. (1681), De re diplomatica (Paris). MCGURK, P. (1994), ‘The Oldest Manuscripts of the Latin Bible’, in R. Gameson (ed.), The Early Medieval Bible: Its Production, Decoration and Use (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1–23. METZGER, B. (1968), The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (New York: Oxford University Press). —— (1981), Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Greek Palaeography (New York: Oxford University Press). OBBINK, D. (1996) (ed.), Philodemus, On Piety Part I (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

PESTMAN, P. W. (1994), The New Papyrological Primer, 2nd edn. (Leiden: E. J. Brill). REYNOLDS, L. D., and WILSON, N. G. (1991), Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

RICHARD, M. (1995), Repertoire des bibliothèques et des catalogues de manuscrits grecs, 3rd edn. (Turnhout: Brepols). ROBERTS, C. H. (1956), Greek Literary Hands, 350 B.C.–400 A.D. (Oxford: Clarendon Press). SEIDER, R. (1967–90), Paläographie der griechischen Papyri (Stuttgart: Hiersemann). STEFFENS, F. (1903), Lateinische Paläographie: Hundert Tafeln in Lichtdruck mit genüberstehender Transscription nebst Erläuterungen und einer systematischen Darstellung der Entwicklung der lateinischen Schrift (Freiburg: Veith).

end p.164

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved —— (1910), Paléographie latine: 125 facsimilés en phototypie accompagnés de transcriptions et d'explications avec un exposé systématique de l'histoire de l'écriture latine (Trier: Schaar & Dathe; Paris: H. Champion). THOMPSON, E. M. (1894), Handbook of Greek and Latin Palaeography (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. repr., Chicago: Ares, 1980). —— (1912), An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography (Oxford: Clarendon

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Press; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1973). THORPE, J. E. (1972), Principles of Textual Criticism (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library). TRAUBE, L. (1907), Nomina sacra: Versuch einer Geschichte der christlichen Kurzung (Munich: Beck; repr., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967). TURNER, E. G. (1968), Greek Papyri: An Introduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press). WEST, M. L. (1973), Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique Applicable to Greek and Latin Texts (Stuttgart: Teubner). Websites

‘Biblical Manuscripts Project’, T. J. Finney, Manning, Australia: , 1 October 2006. The Codex Sinaiticus Project, University of Birmingham: , 1 October 2006. ‘Codices Electronici Sangallenses,’ Stiftsbibliothek, Sankt Gallen: , 1 October 2006. ‘Digital Medievalist’: , 1 October 2006. Electronic Access to Medieval Manuscripts Project, Hill Monastic Manuscript Library and Vatican Film Library: , 1 October 2006. Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, St John's University, over 75,000 records: , 1 October 2006. Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (IRHT), Paris, microfilm of 55,000 manuscripts: , 1 October 2006; with a glossary at , 1 October 2006. Manuscript Libraries, John Rawlings, Stanford University: , 1 October 2006. ‘Medieval Manuscript Manual’ (Dept. of Medieval Studies, Central European University): , 1 October 2006. ‘Medieval Writing’, Dianne and John Tillotson, Canberra: , 1 October 2006. ‘Palaeography,’ The Schoyen Collection, Oslo and London: , 1 October 2006. ‘Paleografia Latina,’ Fernando de Lasala, Rome: , 1 October 2006. ‘POxy: Oxyrhynchus Online’, Oxford University, the Oxyrhynchus papyri:

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, 1 October 2006. Vatican Film Library, St Louis University, over 30,000 Vatican manuscripts: , 1 October 2006. end p.165

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [169]-[185]

8 Jews and Christians

*

*

I would like to thank Annette Yoshiko Reed and Rebecca Krawiec for reading through a draft of this chapter and offering valuable comments and suggestions. Andrew S. Jacobs Abstract: Approaches – Sources Keywords: Christ, Christian

8.1 Approaches A concise narrative of the ‘split’ between ancient Judaism and Christianity persists in modern scholarship. This narrative has its roots in a theologically conditioned, supersessionist reading of the New Testament, in which the messianic salvation rejected by the Jews was taken up by Gentile believers and became the distinct religion of ‘the Christians’ (Acts 11: 26). A less overtly theological permutation of this narrative endures in secular academia (although note Lieu 1994). Commonly, and somewhat romantically, referred to as the ‘parting of the ways’ (Dunn 1991 and 1992; Lieu 1994; Becker and Reed 2003b), this account describes how inner-sectarian debate over Jesus's messiahship, combined with the trauma of Jewish revolts in the first and second centuries, led those more universalist members of the Jesus movement to splinter off from ‘mainstream’ Judaism (solidifying, according to many followers of this model, into nascent rabbinism during the same period) (Segal 1986). Students of this ‘parting of the ways’ attend to various ‘moments’ as important way-stations on this path to definitive division: the expulsion of Jesus-believing Jews from the synagogues;1 the repercussions of the first and second Jewish Wars (Goodman 1989); even the fourth-century legalization and institutionalization of ‘orthodox’ Christianity following Constantine the Great and the Council of Nicaea end p.169

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved have been identified as ‘points of no return’ on the parting of the ways (Ruether 1972; Boyarin 2003: 66). From that point on (whatever point is identified), this view teaches, relations between the distinctive religions of Jews and Christians were rare and usually competitive in nature. As Adam Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed have recently explained, both historically and theologically minded students of early Christianity find common cause in subscribing to this ‘parting of the ways’ model: [T]he metaphor of ‘parted ways’ allows for both Judaism and Christianity

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to be approached as authentic religions in their own right, with equally strong links to the biblical and Second Temple Jewish heritage they share.... Moreover, the notion of the ‘Parting of the Ways’ fits well with contemporary ecumenical concerns, providing a foundation for interreligious dialogue and buttressing popular appeals to a common ‘JudeoChristian’ ethic. (Becker and Reed 2003b: 15–16) That is, the ‘parting of the ways’ is a clear yet benign metaphor that allows each religion to maintain a robust history and a common genealogy, just connected enough to justify ongoing, friendly relations, but not so connected that the distinctive tradition of each religion becomes too blurred. This amicable model, however, rests on several contestable presuppositions. In order to be sure that the ways have parted, we must be able to recognize a twin set of distinctive ideological destinations called ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’. Yet how do we, at a remove of several centuries, determine who was a Jew and who was a Christian? One option is to rely on such authoritative (and, ultimately, triumphant) sources as ‘the rabbis’ and ‘the fathers’. Such reliance, however, risks reifying normative discourses that were by no means universally acknowledged in the first centuries CE. Another option is to take the word of anyone claiming the identity ‘Jew’ and ‘Christian’ and reconstruct more expansive ‘Judaisms’ and ‘Christianities’; in this case, though, we risk ending up with categories so broad and amorphous as to be ultimately unhelpful. What would it mean to speak of a non-Jewish Christianity that embraces both Marcionites and Ebionites? How do we envision the boundaries of a non-Gentile Judaism whose members might be substantively indistinguishable from their Gentile neighbours (S. J. D. Cohen 1993)? And how do we locate those groups that seem to confound any boundary-making, such as Gentile ‘Godfearers’ frequenting synagogues, or those groups that scholars dub ‘Jewish Christians’ who stubbornly resist classification (Fredriksen 2003: 49–51; Reed 2003: 188–96, 219–21)? Without secure, historically identifiable groups, the parting ways could lead us off a conceptual cliff. This historiographic uncertainty leads directly to a methodological quandary facing, to some degree, all students of the history of religions. To imagine ‘parting ways’ is to envision religions as stable entities developing coherently over time, occasionally shedding unsuccessful ‘mutations’ (heresies) like so many exotic, extinct religious Neanderthals. This kind of evolutionary view of religions emerged end p.170

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved in the nineteenth century, ‘scientifically’ rewriting what were at root colonialist discourses of theological self-description (Chidester 2000). The sources at hand in the study of ancient Judaism and Christianity, insisting as they do on the providentially guided triumph of ‘true’ religion (orthodoxy), make this evolutionary model, while historiographically perilous, also especially tempting. Yet, since the work of Walter Bauer (1971; German original 1934), students of early Christianity especially have learned to mistrust overly monolithic models of orthodox development. An additional problematic assumption of the ‘parting of the ways’ is the relative rarity and enmity of ‘Jewish—Christian relations’ in antiquity. This downplaying of ongoing and complex interactions between Jews and Christians is ultimately the result of centuries-long debates over how to balance the rhetorical and historical aspects of our ancient sources.2 These debates have serious historiographic and ethical implications. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was no attempt to reconstruct ‘Jewish-Christian relations’, because most

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prominent historians believed that there were no such relations. Judaism, following the advent of Christ and the destruction of the Temple, was a failed world religion withering on the vine (Harnack 1965: 70–1). For scholars such as Adolf von Harnack, the ‘parting of the ways’ had Christians taking the only open road, while Spätjudentum (‘late Judaism’) ran off the rails into a ditch (Harnack 1883: 59–91; S. J. D. Cohen 1991). Furthermore, the listless failure of Judaism meant that Christians must have been focused rather on their more vibrant ‘pagan’ rivals. Any Christian writings about Jews, therefore, were a literary smokescreen: there was nothing to be learned about Jews and Christians from the writings of the early church. While some of Harnack's contemporaries protested against the overtly supersessionist vision of lively Christianity leaving a crippled Judaism in the dust (see Jacobs 2003: 100), it took the shattering events of the Second World War, and the traumatized aftermath of the Holocaust, to bring a sea change to the study of Jews and Christians (Gager 1985: 13). Scholars realized that the assertion of ancient Judaism's spiritual vacuity might have been motivated by more than impartial scholarship, and might further have licensed violence-both theological and literal-against contemporary Jews. A new study of ‘JewishChristian relations’ emerged to rectify this historiographic and ethical lapse. Soon after the War appeared Marcel Simon's Verus Israel, reversing the terms of Harnack's sceptical supersessionism (Simon 1986; Baumgarten 1999). Judaism was no longer moribund, but vigorous; Christian writings about Jews were no longer rhetorical ciphers, but realistic reflections of an ongoing and spirited confrontation between the two religions (Simon 1986: 369). Simon and his fellow travellers reimagined a ‘parting of the ways’ that set Judaism and Christianity on equally broad boulevards of development, with the roads frequently, and spectacularly, crossing. In recent decades, this hopeful scholarship of recovery and reinvigoration of Judaism has coincided with a broader ethical concern for multiculturalism. end p.171

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Miriam Taylor's Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity (1995) challenged Simon's ‘conflict theory’ (her characterization of Simon's especially dynamic vision of Jewish-Christian relations): could not such a reading, she asked, be used to blame Jews for the violence perpetrated against them throughout history? Could any Jewish provocation possibly justify the virulence of Christian rhetoric and animus toward the Jews? She proposed, instead, a return to reading Christian literature on Jews as rhetorical devices that conveyed symbolic information about Christian theology. The lives and minds of the Jews themselves perforce remained a mystery (although she did not return to Harnack's historical pessimism with regard to Jewish vitality), but Christians must maintain responsibility for their own rhetorical violence (Taylor 1995: 195). While the ways certainly parted, only the rocky and troubling Christian road remained visible from our historical vantage point. Taylor's claims have crystallized an ongoing debate among a variety of scholars committed both ethically and historiographically to the recovery of real, vivacious Jews coexisting with Christians (Carleton Paget 1997; Shoemaker 1999). Few scholars assert that all of our sources can be read as positive evidence for the messy, but ultimately ‘real’, experience of early Jews and Christians (see Fredriksen 2003); rather, most try to steer a middle ground between ‘image’ and ‘reality’ in order to bracket off clearly hyperbolic Christian rhetoric from the kernels of historical interaction embedded within our sources (De Lange 1976; Wilken 1983; Lieu 1996). Throughout the course of this debate, the intersection of historiographic and ethical claims in the studies of ancient Jews and Christians becomes apparent: the robustness of Judaism in the first centuries CE is linked

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directly with our interpretations of the reality of Jews encoded in the early Christian writings. To read Jews in Christian texts as ‘mere rhetoric’ is either to claim the triumph of Christian supersession and the fallibility of ancient Judaism (so Harnack) or to privilege the deeply encoded ‘symbolic anti-Judaism’ that pervades all such Christian writings (so Taylor). Conversely, to read Christian evidence for Jews as reflective of a ‘real situation’ is both to posit the vitality of ancient Judaism and possibly to concede a concrete basis for Christian vitriol (see Cameron 1994 and Horowitz 1998).

8.2 Sources The tangle of historiographic and ethical issues embedded in the study of JewishChristian relations must be confronted by any student hoping to do productive work in this area. It is rare to find an early Christian text that does not speak about Jews and Judaism, and usually in a highly charged (although multifaceted) manner. The present challenge for the historian of early Jewish-Christian relations is to end p.172

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved juggle the rhetorical bias of our sources and the academic desire for an unbiased analysis of history. A fair-minded student of early Christianity might seek to avoid unduly internalizing early Christian prejudice by turning to non-Christian sources for balance: surely any anti-Jewish sting of our Christian texts might be tempered by gaining perspective from the ‘other side’? Some early studies have sought to ‘fact check’ Christian sources in this manner (e.g. Bardy 1925; Ginzberg 1935), but caution is still warranted (Baskin 1985: 56–9). First, the quantity and quality of Jewish sources in the first five centuries CE are monumentally dwarfed by what we have from the Christian side: after the textual riches of first-century Judaism (the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus) comes a sudden quiet from Mediterranean Jewry. Historians of Judaism have made valiant efforts to fill in that lacuna with lesser-known texts, epigraphic and other inscriptional remains, and archaeological witnesses (Rutgers 1992, 1995; Braun 1998), but the rising crescendo of Christian voices still risks drowning out these Jewish remains. One significant body of Jewish texts surviving from this period is, of course, the rabbinic corpus: the Mishnah and Tosefta from the third centuries, early midrashim, the Talmudic compilations from Palestine and Mesopotamia, as well as scattered, related liturgical, poetic, and apocalyptic texts from the pre-Islamic period (Strack and Stemberger 1992; Neusner 1999). These sources present their own obstacles to ‘balancing’ out the Christian voice (but see Segal 1991). In the first place, while we might imagine the slow interpenetration of rabbinic Jewish authority into the synagogues of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern diaspora, there is no clear evidence that rabbinic Judaism was the norm outside of the circle of sages and disciples before the Islamic period (Schwartz 2001: 103–28; Boyarin 2004: 151–201). To make rabbinism the voice of ancient Judaism, therefore, is to slip into an anachronistic essentialism that uncritically takes up the normative discourse of the rabbis themselves. Even when we can reasonably theorize some form of contact between the sages of Palestine and Christians (as in the case of Origen of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Jerome: Urbach 1971; Kimelman 1980; Blowers 1988; Lapin 1996; Hollerich 1999: 147–53), rabbinic texts do not treat Christianity with the same obsessiveness as Christians speak of Judaism (the scandalous tales about Jesus compiled in the Sefer toldot Yeshu represent a much later crystallization of scattered rabbinic folklore: Biale 1999: 131–6). When Christianity appears in the

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rabbinic writings, or in poetical or apocalyptic texts, it is thickly veiled and coded, or lumped together with the panoply of ‘heresies’ (minim) that serve for the theoretical and rhetorical construction of rabbinism (Kalmin 1994; Himmelfarb 1990; Wheeler 1991; Biale 1999). It is, of course, interesting to find this compounded, even deliberate silence on the rabbinic side in late antiquity, but interpreting that silence can prove frustrating. Lacking any significant narrative discussion of Christians by Jews, some scholars have turned to more oblique modes of ‘contact’ that might be gauged from both sides, such as very promising recent work on the possibilities of competitive end p.173

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved biblical interpretation (e.g. Baskin 1985; Visotzky 1995; Hirshman 1996). These studies not only demonstrate the likelihood of intellectual interaction (both adversarial and, it has been suggested, co-operative), they also provide a useful corrective to the segregated paths depicted by the ‘parting of the ways’. Yet, even as these valuable contributions to intellectual and cultural histories provide us with new, broad-brush views of the exegetical contacts between elite Jews and Christians, they still do not provide a full-blooded social history of Jewish —Christian relations. Some students of late antiquity have turned to material remains as a way of ameliorating the partiality of Christian sources and the paucity of Jewish sources. Historians have made strides in reconstructing varieties of ancient Judaism from the wealth of late ancient evidence from synagogues across the Mediterranean and ancient Near East (Rutgers 1995; Schwartz 2001: 203–89). The physical remains of Jews and Christians, often discovered in tantalizing proximity, suggest contacts and relations between the two groups throughout the late ancient Mediterranean. Certainly the thick material presence of Jews in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East (some estimates calculate Jews comprising as much as 7–8 per cent of the population of the Roman Empire; Hopkins 1998: 212–16) belies the notion that Jews and Christians walked on parted ways that only rarely crossed (Meyers 1988; North 1992). Yet, as critical histories of archaeology demonstrate, even the analysis of stones and bones often entangles the analyst in questions of bias, presupposition, and hermeneutical uncertainty (so argue the proponents of ‘postprocessual archaeology’). Usually, material remains can establish only the bare fact of proximity or coexistence, leaving the analyst to fill in the quality of such spatial relations, often with highly contradictory conclusions.3 Stones can only tell so much of the story, and, eventually, the historian will find herself turning to the fraught literary remains of Christians.4 It is difficult to catalogue the number and contents of Christian writings that deal with Jews and Judaism, because the topic is so ubiquitous. From the second century onward, many Christians (who so self-identify) used the category of ‘Jews’, along with its conceptual double, ‘the Greeks’ or ‘the Gentiles’, as totalizing rubrics by which to shape a new world-view. Among early examples are the Epistle to Diognetus 5 and Aristides's Apology 2. Pauline universalizing language of ‘neither Jew nor Greek’ by the fourth century had become a classificatory lens through which to fashion a global religious topography (Eusebius, Praep. 1. 5. 12 and Dem. 1. 2. 1). Within this Christian totalizing discourse, the ‘Jew’ appears with such frequency as to risk blurring any historical focus. In order to sharpen our angle of approach, it is perhaps worth attempting some classification of our sources. First, it is important to distinguish between pre-Constantinian and post-Constantinian sources. By the end of the fourth century, the interests of Christian institutions had begun to merge-fitfully and not without drama, to be

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sure-with the political interests of the Roman Empire. (A similar merging of religious and end p.174

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved political interests also took place in the Persian Sasanian Empire, with comparable effects on relations between Zoroastrians and Jews (Neusner 1970).) Briefly, a Christian thinking and writing about Jews in the second century operated from a very different political and social position than his counterpart three centuries later, when the full weight of Roman imperial authority potentially lay behind his words and ideas. A student of early Jewish-Christian relations must attend differently to texts such as the Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho, or Tertullian's Against the Jews than she would Ephrem's anti-Jewish hymns or the biblical commentaries of Jerome or Cyril of Alexandria. Next, we can begin to ask how Jews function in various Christian texts. Some of the earliest Christian writings posit Jews as religious adversaries. This apologetic literature, supposedly written in ‘defence’ of the new faith of the Christians, constructs a spiritual world under siege, both literal and metaphorical. Jews appear aligned in a sinister fashion with Rome in second-century martyrologies (see the Martyrdoms of Polycarp and Pionius, and Gibson 2001, 2003) and as a source of the ill-informed rumours and slanders necessitating response in apologetic texts (e.g. Tertullian, Apol. 7). An apologetic subgenre of texts ‘in response to Jews’ (adversus Iudaeos) emerged in the third century in the Latin West (e.g. Tertullian, Ad Iud.; Lukyn 1935), and compilations of biblical testimonia allegedly written to answer Jewish debates proliferated across the Mediterranean (e.g. Cyprian, Testimonies for Quirinus; Albl 2004). For more positivist historians, the representation of Jews as adversaries encodes a social reality: that Jews, who enjoyed official public status in the Roman Empire, were on the attack against Christians (although not with the literal violence conveyed in martyr texts). They prayed against Christians, met them acrimoniously in the marketplace of religious ideas, and even cheered as they were tortured and executed by unsympathetic Roman authorities (Gibson 2001, 2003; North 1992). A different historical reading finds in all of these texts rhetorical construction with little or no basis in reality: Christians projected their own fears and dissatisfactions on to the Jews (already encoded as ‘the bad guys’ by a particular reading of the gospels), and we learn nothing of historical interest from these highly literary constructions. Even accepting the latter, more pessimistic view, however, the historian of Jewish-Christian relations should not despair of attaining some glimpse into ancient lives and ideas. We can shift our focus away from reconstructing the immediate motives for the creation and consumption of these texts, and look instead to their ‘afterlife’: how would Christians, instructed by these adversarial accounts of Jews, potentially interact with ‘real’ Jews the next time they left the house? Patterned on real conflicts, or concocted from a stew of unfair stereotypes, the adversarial and apologetic literature of the first Christian centuries constituted formative texts, scripting world-views and even future interactions and, in this sense, they can tell us something historically ‘real’ about Jewish-Christian relations. end p.175

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We can use the same approach with even more literary narrative sources, in which Jews function as ‘characters’ patently crafted to convey Christian ideas. Beginning in the second century, Christians wrote about their ‘dialogues’ with Jews (Justin Martyr's Dial. is the earliest complete text; on later texts see Varner 2005 and Lahey 2006). Although some Christians do mention holding public and private debates with Jews (Tertullian, Ad Iud. 1; Origen, Letter to Africanus, 1. 9, and Cels. 1. 44; Jerome, Preface to the Book of Psalms), scholars debate how much we can distil the perspective of actual Jews from such Christian texts (Harnack 1883; Olster 1994; Horner 2001). Nonetheless, these texts may provide a window into the evolving parameters within which Jews and Christians might plausibly interact. Even the most highly literary and fantastic of creations in which Jews figure as characters, such as the hagiographic literature of the fourth and fifth centuries, may be read not as direct windows into what specific Jews did, but how Jews in general might be perceived by their Christian neighbours. A host of texts, for instance, related to the discovery (inventio) of relics portray Jewish characters as integral to the recovery of a sacred past (Drijvers and Drijvers 1997; Limor 1996; Jacobs 2004: 174–91); few scholars credit the existence of these convenient Jewish figures at the discovery of the True Cross or Mary's robe, but we can appreciate the degree to which hagiography gave Christians a lens through which to bring their own world, and the Jews within it, into focus. We can even begin to consider the ways in which Jews-otherwise falling into historical silence-might likewise have taken up and played with the roles scripted for them in Christian texts. As part of this rich textual mosaic we can even include those texts in which Jews appear as a cipher: homilies and biblical commentaries in which Jews function as the metaphorical symbol of wilful unbelief (Wilken 1971) and heresiological sources in which ‘Judaizing’ signals inappropriate beliefs about the full divinity of Christ (Lorenz 1980; Burrus 2002). Even when ‘the Jew’ stands as a Christian metaphor, we can sense the patterns of the manner in which Christians defined their place in a newly Christian world, and the solidifying role they constructed for Jews in that world. Even from the most rhetorical of Christian literature, we can still hope to gain a sense of the possibilities of historical relations between Jews and Christians. Just as we might derive from these metaphorical depictions of Jews rough contours of social history, so too we must endeavour to recall that even the most mundane and ‘realistic’ of Christian texts are ideological and rhetorical products. For instance, Jews figure significantly in the narrative of the first Christian histories. Eusebius enshrines the supersessionist ‘parting of the ways’ in his Ecclesiastical History; and his successors in the Latin West and Greek East (Rufinus of Aquileia, Socrates Scholasticus, Sozomen, Theodoret of Cyrrhus) continue to integrate Jews into their heavily theological historical narratives of the dovetailing of orthodoxy and empire, with Jews cast as the impious and politically disloyal ‘others’. These authors end p.176

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved carefully frame Christian communal identity through a re-conceptualization of ‘the past’, and so should not be read as simple factual accounts. Though we should carefully weigh the historical details of these accounts, their broad, prescriptive framing of Jewish-Christian relations can be understood, along with our other sources, as producing, as opposed to recording, a particular brand of reality. We can likewise approach the legislation regarding Jews from the post-Constantinian period, particularly those laws contained in the codes of the arch-orthodox emperors Theodosius II and Justinian I. Historians continue to debate the historical value of imperial legislation, which was often repetitious, contradictory, and difficult to enforce. The ‘matter-of-fact’ quality of legislation on

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Jews (see e.g. various laws concerning Jews in Theodosian Code, book 16, and Justinianic Code, book 1, as well as Theodosius II's Novella 3 and Justinian's Novella 146) presents us, again, with an opportunity to parse the subtle ways in which Christian rhetoric constructed a real world for its Christian, as well as its Jewish, subjects (Bachrach 1985; Linder 1987). We can achieve a further sense of how this constructed worldview could shape both Christian and Jewish reality through those writings in which Jews function as the subject of debate between Christians: for instance, in the homilies of John Chrysostom (usually referred to as ‘Against the Jews’ but ostensibly directed against Judaizing Christians), who rails against Christians who frequent the local synagogue for festivals and oath-taking (Wilken 1983); or in the controversy between Jerome and Rufinus and, a little later, the correspondence between Jerome and Augustine in which Jerome is taken to task for consulting with and learning Hebrew and midrash from Palestinian Jews (Jacobs 2004: 83–96). In the course of Jerome's defence, he utters the memorable line that may very well encapsulate the multifaceted ways in which Christians constructed Jews into their world-view: ‘If it is expedient to hate any people and to detest any nation, I have a notable hatred for the circumcised; even now they persecute our Lord Jesus Christ in the synagogues of Satan. Yet can anyone object to me for having had a Jew as a teacher?’ (Ep. 84. 3. 3) The contradictions of desire and loathing that mark Jerome's peculiar-and yet, increasingly, representative-view of ‘JewishChristian relations’ is also visible in a cautionary tale told to Jerome by his peevish correspondent Augustine. Jerome's new translation of the book of Jonah, executed iuxta Hebraeos (‘according to the Hebrews’' or ‘according to the Jews’), was read out in a small North African village. Upon reaching Jerome's new translation of a single word-‘ivy’ instead of ‘gourd’ (Jonah 4: 6)-the assembled congregation burst out in anger, accusing the translation of being impiously ‘Judaized’ and thus inappropriate for church reading. At that point the beleaguered bishop brought in a group of local Jews, who treacherously sided with the rabble-rousers against Jerome's more authentic Jewish retranslation (Augustine, Ep. 71. 3. 5; see Fürst 1999). How should the student of Jewish-Christian relations interpret this group of North African Jews summoned end p.177

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved by a small-town bishop? Do they represent a casual and amicable détente between the two communities, or the fearful minority serving at the pleasure of Christian masters? Is their response genuine and helpful, or sly and deliberately subversive? Any single answer that seeks definitively to pin down historical details would drain this anecdote of its richer cultural significance: the inscription of complex, even contradictory, motives, fears, and desires at the core of these tangled inter-religious contacts. It is worth noting that the teller of this story, Augustine of Hippo Regius, would leave as his own legacy in western ‘JewishChristian relations’ the dubious ‘witness theology’: Jews remain in this Christian world to bear witness both to the truth of scriptures (as, perhaps, in this little story) and to the suffering inflicted on those who hear and reject the salvation of Christ (J. Cohen 1998; 1999: 19–67). Despite the productive multiplicity of our sources, scholars are often tempted to distil Jewish-Christian relations to a single theme: ‘rhetorical excess’ or ‘real-life conflict’ or ‘parted ways’. Such irresoluble anxieties emerge out of a scholarly tension that haunts much of the project of history writing: the desire for certainty about the past combined with a suspicion of the truth-claims of our primary sources (Clark 2004). The study of Jews and Christians in late antiquity makes this tense longing even more acute, conditioned as it has been by

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ideological, theological, and philosophical insistence on separation, segregation, and self-definition reaching all the way back to the early Jews and Christians themselves. Yet the particular circumstances of this sub-discipline of early Christian (and, in perhaps another Handbook, early Jewish) studies also provide an opportunity for the scholar critically and productively to engage with this persistent academic anxiety. Over the course of the first Christian centuries, as the political and cultural positions of Christians fluctuated and transmuted, Christians constructed a complex series of relationships with their Jewish neighbours. They scripted these complexities through a variety of texts, ranging from the fanciful to the mundane, resulting in a mutable and unstable matrix of the possibilities of ‘Jewish-Christian relations’. If any observation could be said to define the cultural, intellectual, and social contexts of late antiquity, it is that the various discourses of stability (‘Hellenism’, ‘imperium’, ‘Romanitas’) frequently masked deep-rooted and complex fluidities (Bowersock 1990; Cameron 1991; Ando 2000). The implications of this observation are slowly beginning to take hold in the study of Jews and Christians in this period, as much recent, engaging work on ancient Jews and Christians has moved to overcome facile assumptions of stable religious and inter-religious identities (S.J.D. Cohen 1999; Fonrobert 2000, 2001; Boyarin 2004). Even as we take seriously the desire of many ancient Christian and Jews for secure self-definition and differentiation from ‘others’, we must also understand these desires as a species of self-fashioning rhetoric: ‘true’ in the sense that they work materially to shape the worldview of Jews and Christians, even if they are not ‘factual’ in the sense that we directly recover from such historical remains an unmediated past. Notes end p.178

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved 1.

The debated theory of an ‘expulsion’ of the Jesus movement from first- or second-century synagogues rests on a confluence of interpretations of the Gospel of John (see Jn 9: 22, 12: 42, and 16: 2); ambiguous references in Justin Martyr, Origen, Epiphanius, and Jerome; and speculation on the origins and functions of the rabbinic birkat ha-minim (Kimelman 1981; Horbury 1982). 2. For more detail on this material, see Becker and Reed (2003b) and Jacobs (2003). 3. Take, for example, the long, strange history of interpretation of the monumental synagogue of Capernaum built ‘down the street’ from the church of St Peter (Jacobs 1999: 363–5). 4. Even the identification of literary remains as ‘Christian’ is fraught (see above on essentialism). For the purposes of approaching ‘Jewish-Christian relations’, we can focus on written sources operating from a self-consciously Christian and non-Jewish perspective. The question of so-called Jewish Christians who (according to Christian sources, at least) claimed to be both Jewish and Christian, (see Jerome, Ep. 112. 13) is left aside for now, but see Reed (2003: 189–96). Suggested Reading Primary sources It is difficult to find an early Christian text that does not mention Jews or Judaism.Williams (1935) remains a helpful collection of texts written explicitly adversus Judaeos (against Judaism), balanced by the critical survey of Baskin (1985). In addition, some primary sources repeatedly surface in the study of early Jewish—Christian relations and provide important touchstones for any work in the discipline (sources found below in the references are listed only by title;

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for all others, date and publisher of a good, recent translation are given where available): Melito of Sardis's Paschal Homily in On Pascha, trans. and ed. Alistair Stewart- Sykes (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Press, 1999); JustinMartyr's Dialogue;much discussion of Jews and Judaism is found in Origen's Cels., as well as his Letter to Africanus and his homilies and commentaries (many translated in ANF); Tertullian's Against the Jews, which laid groundwork for much of the Latin genre, up to Augustine's treatise of the same name; Eusebius of Caesarea's Praep., as well as his Hist. eccl.; the Syriac author Aphrahat's select Demonstrations against Judaism, trans. and commented on by Jacob Neusner, Aphrahat and Judaism: The Christian—Jewish Argument in Fourth—Century Iran (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971); John Chrysostom's homilies Against the Judaizers; Jerome's various translations, commentaries, and correspondence; and Augustine's development of the ‘witness-theology’ in City of God, 18, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003). Secondary sources Many modern secondary sources continue to be influential—in terms of both historical content and methodological criticism—and should provide ample groundwork for the student of early Christianity. As most of these works are found in the references below, I give them only by author and year. Baskin (1985) provides a still useful analysis of important end p.179

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved work that has been done, and remains to be done, in the field; Becker and Reed (2003a, b) contains both a helpful overview and several important, individual studies on the topic. Important general and specific studies to begin with are Boyarin (2004); De Lange (1976); Fredriksen (2003); Gager (1983); Lieu (1992, 1994, 1996); Simon (1986);Wilken (1971, 1983). Bibliography Primary sources Recent English translations are given where available; otherwise, the reader is directed to older translations or critical editions with translations into other modern languages.

ARISTIDES , Apologia, ed. J. Armitage Robison, TaS 1. 1 (Cambridge, 1893). Text and Eng. trans. in J. Rendel Harris (2004) (ed.), The Apology of Aristides on Behalf of the Christians (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press). CYPRIAN OF CARTHAGE , Testimonia ad Quirinum. Latin text ed. R. Weber and M. Beveuot, in CCSL 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1972). The only modern Eng. trans. is in the ANF 5P. Epistle of Barnabas. Text and Eng. trans. in B. Ehrman (2003) (ed.), The Apostolic Fathers: Epistle of Barnabas, Papias and Quadratus, Epistle to Diognetus, The Shepherd of Hermas, ii, LCL (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

Epistle to Diognetus. Text and Eng. trans. in (2003) B. Ehrman (ed.), The Apostolic Fathers, containing Epistle of Barnabas, Papias and Quadratus, Diogn., The Shepherd of Hermas, ii, LCL (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

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EUSEBIUS OF CAESAREA , Ecclesiastical History. Rev. Eng. trans. in A. Louth (1989) (ed.), The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. G. A. Williamson (London: Penguin). —— Demonstratio evangelica. The 1920 Eng. trans. by W. J. Ferrar was reprinted in The Proof of the Gospel: Being the Demonstratio evangelica of Eusebius of Cæsarea (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2001). —— Praeparatio evangelica. The 1903 Eng. trans. by E. Hamilton Gifford was reprinted in De evangelica praeparatione (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1981). A French trans. and critical edition, ed. J. Sirinelli et al., has been published in SC 206, 215, 228, 262, 266, 292, 307, 338, and 369 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1974–91). JEROME , Letters. Trans. of some letters are in NPNF2 6; Latin text ed. I. Hilberg in Epistulae, CSEL 54–6 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1910–18). Correspondence with Augustine is in C. White (1990) (ed. and trans.), The Correspondence (394–419) between Jerome and Augustine of Hippo (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press).

—— Preface to the book of Psalms. For Eng. trans. NPNF26. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM , Adversus Iudaeos. Eng. trans. in P. W. Harkins (1979) (trans.), Discourses against Judaizing Christians (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press). Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, ed. M. Marcovich, PTS 47 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997). Revised Eng. trans. in T. B. Falls (2003), rev. T. P. Halton (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press). Justinianic Code and Novellae. The entire Corpus Iuris Civilis of Justinian is in P. Krueger, W. Kunkel, and R. Schoell (1872–1988) (eds.), 3 vols. (Dublin: Weidmann; Berlin: de end p.180

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Gruyter, 1915). An Eng. trans. of many of these sources is found in The Digest of Justinian, ed. A. Watson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). Martyrdom of Pionius. In H. Musurillo (2000) (ed.), The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, with introduction, texts, and trans., 2 vols., OECT (Oxford: Clarendon Press, repr. from the 1972 edn.) Martyrdom of Polycarp. Text and Eng. trans. in B. Ehrman (2003) (ed.), The Apostolic Fathers, contains I Clement, II Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Didache et al., i, LCL (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). ORIGEN , Against Celsus. Eng. trans. in H. Chadwick (1952), Origen: Contra

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Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— Letter to Africanus, Ep. 1. Eng. trans. of this correspondence is in ANF 4. A French trans, ed. N. de Lange, in SC 30 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1983).

TERTULLIAN , Adversus Iudaeos. Eng. trans. in G. Dunn (2004) (trans.), Tertullian: The Early Church Father (London: Routledge), 63–104. —— Apology. Text and Eng. trans. in T. R. Glover (1998) (ed.), Apology; De Spectaculis, repr. LCL (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press); ed. J. W. Ph. Borleffs et al., CCSL 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954); ed. H. Hoppe, CSEL 69 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1939). The Theodosian Code and Novels, in C. Pharr (1950) (trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Latin text in Codex Theodosianus, ed. P. Krüger (Berlin: T. Mommsen & P. M. Meyer, 1895, 1923). Secondary sources

ALBL, M. C. (2004), Pseudo-Gregory of Nyssa: Testimonies Against the Jews (Leiden: E. J. Brill). ANDO, C. (2000), Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press). BACHRACH, B. S. (1985), ‘The Jewish Community of the Later Roman Empire as Seen in the Codex Theodosianus’, in J. Neusner and E. Frerichs (eds.), ‘To See Ourselves as Others See Us’: Christians, Jews, ‘Others’ in Late Antiquity (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press), 399–421. BARDY , G. (1925), ‘Les traditions juives dans l'oeuvre d'Origène’, RB 34: 217–52.

BASKIN, J. (1985), ‘Rabbinic—Patristic Exegetical Contacts in Late Antiquity: A Bibliographical Reappraisal’, in W. S. Green (ed.), Approaches to Ancient Judaism, v: Studies in Judaism in its Greco-Roman Context (Atlanta: Scholars Press), 53–80. BAUER, W. (1971), Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). Trans. from German, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei in ältesten Christentum (1934), by a team from the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins, ed. R. A. Kraft and G. Krodel, new edn., with added appendices by G. Strecker (Mifflintown, Pa.: Sigler Press, 1996). BAUMGARTEN, A. I. (1999), ‘Marcel Simon's Verus Israel as a Contribution to Jewish History’, HTR 92: 465–78. BECKER, A., and REED, A. Y. (2003a) (eds.), The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck).

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—— (2003b), ‘Introduction: Traditional Models and New Directions’, in Becker and Reed (2003a), 1–33. BIALE, D. (1999), ‘Counter-History and Jewish Polemics against Christianity: The Sefer toldot yeshu and the Sefer zerubavel’, Jewish Social Studies, 6/1: 130–45.

end p.181

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved BLOWERS, P. (1988), ‘Origen, the Rabbis, and the Bible: Towards a Picture of Judaism and Christianity in Third-Century Caesarea’, in C. Kannengeisser and W. L. Petersen (eds.), Origen of Alexandria: His World and Legacy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press), 96–116. BOWERSOCK, G. (1990), Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). BOYARIN, D. (2003), ‘Semantic Differences; or, “Judaism/Christianity”,’, in Becker and Reed (2003a), 66–85. —— (2004), Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

BRAUN, T. (1998), ‘The Jews in the Late Roman Empire’, Scripta Classica Israelica, 17: 142–71. BURRUS, V. (2002), ‘Hailing Zenobia: Anti-Judaism, Trinitarianism, and John Henry Newman’, Culture and Religion, 3: 163–77. CAMERON, A. (1991), Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse, Sather Classical Lectures, 55 (Berkeley: University of California Press). —— (1994), ‘The Jews in Seventh-Century Palestine’, Scripta Classica Israelica, 13: 75–93. CARLETON PAGET, J. (1997), ‘Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity’, ZAC 1: 195–225. CHIDESTER, D. (2000), ‘Colonialism’, in W. Braun and R. T. McCutcheon (eds.), Guide to the Study of Religion (London: Cassell), 423–37. CLARK, E. A. (2004), History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). COHEN, J. (1998), ‘“Slay Them Not”: Augustine and the Jews in Modern

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Scholarship’, Medieval Encounters, 4: 78–92. —— (1999), Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press). COHEN, S. J. D. (1991), ‘Adolf Harnack's “The Mission and Expansion of Judaism”: Christianity Succeeds Where Judaism Fails’, in B. A. Pearson (ed.), The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 163–9. —— (1993), ‘“Those Who Say They Are Jews But Are Not”: How Do You Know a Jew in Antiquity When You See One?’, in S. J. D. Cohen and E. Frerichs (eds.), Diasporas in Antiquity (Atlanta: Scholars Press), 1–45. —— (1999), The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press). DE LANGE, N. (1976), Origen and the Jews: Studies in Jewish—Christian Relations in Third-Century Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

DRIJVERS, H. J. W., and DRIJVERS, J. W. (1997), The Finding of the True Cross: The Judas Kyriakos Legend in Syriac: Introduction, Text, and Translation (Leuven: Peeters). DUNN, J. J. D. (1991), The Parting of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity (London: SCM Press).

—— (1992), Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, A.D. 70 to 135 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans). FONROBERT, C. E. (2000), Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press). —— (2001), ‘The Didascalia Apostolorum: A Mishnah for the Followers of Jesus’, JECS 9: 483–509. FREDRIKSEN, P. (2003), ‘What “Parting of the Ways”? Jews, Gentiles, and the Ancient Mediterranean City’, in Becker and Reed (2003a), 35–63. end p.182

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved FÜRST, Alfons (1999), Augustins Briefwechsel mit Hieronymus (Münster: Aschendorff Verlagsbuchhandlung). GAGER, J. (1983), The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in

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Pagan and Christian Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). GIBSON, E. L. (2001), ‘Jewish Antagonism or Christian Polemic: The Case of the Martyrdom of Pionius’, JECS 9: 339–58. —— (2003), ‘The Jews and Christians in the Martyrdom of Polycarp: Entangled or Parted Ways?’, in Becker and Reed (2003a), 145–58. GINZBERG, L. (1935), ‘Die Haggada bei den Kirchenvätern, VI.: Der Kommentar des Hieronymus zu Jesaja’, in S. Baron and A. Marx (eds.), Jewish Studies in Memory of George A. Kohut (New York: Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation), 279–314. GOODMAN, Martin (1989), ‘Nerva, the Fiscus Iudaicus, and Jewish Identity’, JRS 79: 40–4. HARNACK, A. von (1883), Die Altercatio Simonis Iudaei et Theophilii Christiani: nebst Untersuchungen über die antijüdische Polemik in der alten Kirche; und Die Acta Archelai und das Diatessaron Tatians, TU 1.3a (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs).

—— (1965), Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, 4th edn. (Leipzig: Zentral-Antiquariat de Deutschen Demokratischen Republick; originally J. C. Hinrichs, 1924). HIMMELFARB, M. (1990), ‘Sefer Zerubbabel’, in D. Stern and M. J. Mirsky (eds.), Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press), 67–90. HIRSHMAN, M. (1996), A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press). HOLLERICH, M. J. (1999), Eusebius of Caesarea's ‘Commentary on Isaiah’: Christian Exegesis in the Age of Constantine. OECS (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

HOPKINS, K. (1998), ‘Christian Number and its Implications’, JECS 6: 185–226.

HORBURY , W. (1982), ‘The Benediction of the Minim and Early Jewish-Christian Controversy’, JTS,

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HORNER, T. J. (2001), Listening to Trypho: Justin Martyr's Dialogue Reconsidered (Leuven: Peeters). HOROWITZ, E. (1998), ‘“The Vengeance of the Jews Was Stronger than their Avarice”: Modern Historians and the Persian Conquest of Jerusalem in 614’, Jewish Social Studies, 4/2: 1–39. JACOBS, A. S. (1999), ‘Visible Ghosts and Invisible Demons: The Place of Jews in Early Christian Terra Sancta’, in E. M. Meyers (ed.), Galilee Through the

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Centuries: Confluence of Cultures (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns), 359–75.

—— (2003), ‘The Lion and the Lamb: Reconsidering Jewish-Christian Relations in Anti-quity’, in Becker and Reed (2003a), 94–118. —— (2004), Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press). KALMIN, R. (1994), ‘Christians and Heretics in Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity’, HTR 87: 155–69. KIMELMAN, R. (1980), ‘Rabbi Yohanan and Origen on the Song of Songs: A ThirdCentury Jewish-Christian Debate’, HTR 73: 567–95. —— (1981), ‘Birkat Ha-Minim and the Lack of Evidence for an Anti-Christian Jewish Prayer in Late Antiquity’, in E. P. Sanders, A. I. Baumgarten, and A. Mendelson (eds.), Jewish and end p.183

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Christian Self-Definition, ii: Aspects of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman Period (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 226–44, 391–403. LAHEY , L. (2006), ‘The Christian—Jewish Dialogues through the Sixth Century (Excluding Justin)’, in O. Skarsaune and R. Hvalvik (eds.), Jewish Believers in Jesus: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Press), i. 581–639. LAPIN, H. (1996), ‘Jewish and Christian Academics in Roman Palestine: Some Preliminary Observations’, in A. Raban and K. G. Holum (eds.), Caesarea Maritima: A Retrospective after Two Millennia (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 496–512.

LIEU, J. (1992), ‘History and Theology in Christian Views of Judaism’, in J. Lieu, J. North, and T. Rajak (eds.), The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge), 79–96. —— (1994), ‘“The Parting of the Ways”: Theological Construct or Historical Reality?’, JSNT 56: 101–19. —— (1996), Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark). LIMOR, O. (1996), ‘Christian Sacred Space and the Jews’, in J. Cohen (ed.), From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag), 55–77. LINDER, A. (1987), The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit: Wayne State

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University Press). LORENZ, R. (1980), Arius Judaizans? Untersuchung zur dogmengeschichtlichen Einordnung des Arius, FKDG 31 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).

MEYERS, E. M. (1988), ‘Early Judaism and Christianity in the Light of Archaeology’, BA 51: 69–79. NEUSNER, J. (1970), A History of the Jews of Babylonia, v: Later Sasanian Times (Leiden: E. J. Brill). —— (1999), Introduction to Rabbinic Literature (New York: Doubleday).

NORTH, J. (1992), ‘The Development of Religious Pluralism’, in J. Lieu, J. North, and T. Rajak (eds.), The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge), 174–93. OLSTER, D. M. (1994), Roman Defeat, Christian Response, and the Literary Construction of the Jew (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

REED, A. Y. (2003), ‘“Jewish Christianity” after the “Parting of the Ways”: Approaches to Historiography and Self-Definition in the Pseudo-Clementines’, in Becker and Reed (2003a), 189–231. RUETHER, R. Radford (1972), ‘Judaism and Christianity: Two Fourth-Century Religions’, SR 2: 1–10. RUTGERS, L. V. (1992), ‘Archaeological Evidence for the Interaction of Jews and Non-Jews in Antiquity’, AJA 96: 101–18. —— (1995), The Jews in Late Ancient Rome (Leiden: E. J. Brill). SCHWARTZ, S. (2001), Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press). SEGAL, A. (1986), Rebecca's Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). —— (1991), ‘Studying Judaism with Christian Sources’, USQR 44: 267–86.

SHOEMAKER, S. J. (1999), ‘“Let Us Go and Burn Her Body”: The Image of the Jews in the Early Dormition Traditions’, CH 68: 775–823. end p.184

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SIMON, M. (1986), Verus Israel: A Study in the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire (135–425), trans. H. McKeating (Oxford: Oxford University Press). STRACK, H. L., and STEMBERGER, G. (1992), Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. M. Bockmuehl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). TAYLOR, M. S. (1995), Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus (Leiden: E. J. Brill). URBACH, E. E. (1971), ‘The Homiletical Interpretation of the Sages and the Expositions of Origen on Canticles, and the Jewish Christian Disputation’, in J. Heinemann and D. Noy (eds.), Studies in Aggadah and Folk Literature, ScrHier 22 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press), 247–75. VARNER, W. (2005), Ancient Jewish—Christian Dialogues: Athanasius and Zacchaeus, Simon and Theophilus, Timothy and Aquila: Introductions, Texts, and Translations (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press). VISOTZKY , B. L. (1995), Fathers of the World: Essays in Rabbinic and Patristic Literatures, WUNT 80 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck). WHEELER, B. M. (1991), ‘Imagining the Sasanian Capture of Jerusalem: The “Prophecy and Dream of Zerubabel” and Antiochus Strategos' “Capture of Jerusalem”,’, OCP 57: 69–85. WILKEN, R. (1971), Judaism and the Early Christian Mind: A Study of Cyril of Alexandria's Exegesis and Theology (New Haven: Yale University Press).

—— (1983), John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press). WILLIAMS, A. Lukyn (1935), Adversus Judaeos: A Bird's-Eye View of Christian ‘Apologiae’ until the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [186]-[202]

9 Pagans and Christians Michele R. Salzman Abstract: Approaches – New Directions – Sources Keywords: Christ, Christian

9.1 Approaches TRADITIONAL narratives on pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire focus on political conflict and end with the triumph of Christianity. In these, the death of Christ opened the way to three centuries of coercion and sporadic outbursts against Christians, precipitated largely by pagans who pressured the state to take action (Frend 1981; Lane Fox 1987: 423–92; Sherwin-White 1964; Ste. Croix 1963, 1964). The emperor Trajan's letter to Pliny is seen as setting the precedent for state policy; Trajan stipulated the pardoning of Christians who proved by worshipping ‘our gods’ that they were no longer ‘atheists’. But those who refused to recant were to be killed, with the imperial caveat that Christians were not be hunted down (Pliny, Ep. 10. 96, to Trajan; 10. 97 is Trajan's response). In response to this threatening state policy and to hostility from their suspicious neighbours, Christians sought to explain their religion; Christian apologetic literature flourished. Only in the middle of the third century did the emperor Decius, in an apparent attempt to unify the Empire, initiate the first Empire-wide religious test that forced the persecution of Christians. Subsequent persecutions by Valerian (257 CE) and Diocletian (303–11) failed miserably as state policy. The conversion of Constantine to Christianity, conventionally dated to his defeat of Maxentius in 312 CE, changed pagan-Christian relations for ever; in 313 CEConstantine and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan which stipulated that the Roman state adopt a position of neutrality end p.186

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved and allow religious freedom to all. Constantine soon took the opportunity to favour his new religion with gifts and privileges. But as Christianity ‘triumphed’ over the course of the fourth century, so too did Christians' growing intolerance for pagans, and also Jews and ‘heretical Christians’ (Drake 1996; 2000: 20–4). So, in the traditional narrative, Christians end the fourth century by persecuting pagans and coercing their conversion. The constant element in this traditional narrative is the political conflict between pagans-most often represented by the Roman state before Constantine-and Christians; only the balance of power shifted after Constantine as Christians came to persecute pagans in the new Christian empire. This clear, simple model of pagan-Christian political conflict leading, in the first three centuries, to

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persecution and martyrdom, and ending, in the fourth century with Christianity triumphant, has been challenged, if not displaced, by nuanced studies of the interactions of pagans and Christians in Roman society. While it is true that politics is still a component in understanding relations between pagans and Christians, social and cultural as well as ideological factors have received greater attention, and the results of these researches have called into question this simple political top-down model of pagan-Christian relations. Even the terms of analysis have been reconsidered.

9.1.1 Terms There is a growing realization among scholars that the categories-pagans and Christians-are the result of the ‘triumph of Christianity narrative’. The category of ‘pagan’ is a Christian construction, and a rather late one at that; it has been argued that the earliest written usage of the term to signify non-Christians occurs in the writings of Tertullian (Pall. 4; Cor. mil. 11), but it is not until the fourth century that we find Christian inscriptions using it with some frequency to refer to persons who had not been baptized (O'Donnell 1977; Lane Fox 1987: 30–1; King 2003: 48). Christians before this date used a varied language to refer to their non-Jewish, non-Christian neighbours. They could call them ‘Gentile’, ‘the heathens’, ‘the nations’; or they could merge them with Greek terminology (‘Greek’, ‘Hellene’). As King observed, ‘Jews and Christians were the constants in this triadic grouping, with the pagans designated depending on who was speaking or who was being addressed’ (King 2003: 48). From this Christian usage classical historians ‘invented’ the term ‘paganism’' to bring together a wide range of traditional religions and cultic practices in the Mediterranean world (Lane Fox 1987: 31). Given the derogatory and essentially Christian perception of ‘paganism’ as a rival religious system, some scholars have argued that simply using the term ‘pagan’ is to assent to the ‘Christian view of the division in society’ (O'Donnell 2002). But then how to describe the non-Christian, non-Jewish religionists in the Roman Empire? end p.187

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved The term ‘polytheist’, derived from the usage of anthropology, has been advanced as a more neutral alternative which also focuses on the multiplicity of cults, ‘highly discontinuous with one another, highly dissimilar’ (O'Donnell 2002; Fowden 1993: 119; Kirsch 2004). However, not all pagans were polytheists; a growing number of scholars see monotheistic tendencies among non-Christians and non-Jews in the early Empire, and have argued that pagans approaching monotheism not only through philosophy but through non-elite cults like Theos Hypsistos represent one of the most important innovations in the secondthrough to the third-century Roman Empire (Athanassiadi and Frede 1999: 1–20; for Theos Hypsistos, see Mitchell 1999). So pagans are, arguably, monotheists, much as Jews were, insofar as they focused on one god; but this does not mean that they thought that there was only one god (Fredriksen 2005). So, when Christians call non-Christians polytheists, they are denigrating them just as if they were calling them ‘pagans’; in this way, too, they could turn the strong tradition of philosophical monotheism against non-Christians (North 2005: 142). Trombley attempted to avoid the term ‘pagan’ entirely. Hence, his book, entitled Hellenic Religion and Christianization. c. 370–529 CE (1993–4), translates literally the word used by Christian apologists for non-Christians. Using the adjective ‘Hellenic’, however, as a general term to describe all non-Christian and

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native religious elements tends to give everything an Attic patina and obscures the fact that the religion under consideration entailed also Roman, Egyptian, and native cults that were venerated by Roman citizens. Given the problems in finding new terminology, most scholars have fallen back on using the term ‘pagan’, but are careful to explain ‘pagan’ as meaning ‘upholders of the ancient or traditional religions’ of the Mediterranean. In this regard, Chuvin, for one, focused on the etymology of pagani, or pagans, as simply ‘people of the place’, town or country, who preserved their local customs, whereas the alieni, the people from elsewhere, were increasingly ‘Christian’; thus, for Chuvin, paganism is the ‘religion of the homeland in its narrowest sense: the city and its outlying countryside, characterized by diversity of practices and beliefs’ (Chuvin 1990: 9). Moreover, throughout antiquity, paganism was a ‘mosaic of established religions linked to the political order’ (Chuvin 1990: 9). This focus on native religious traditions coming in contact with outside ideas-that is, Christianity-infuses more recent regional studies of religion in the Empire, such as Frankfurter's important study of religion in Roman Egypt (1998); this book's subtitle, ‘Assimilation and Resistance’, is meant to ‘challenge the simplistic notion of “pagans”' deliberately fighting off Christian encroachment’ (Frankfurter 1998: 6). Thus Frankfurter, like most ancient historians and religionists, still uses the term ‘pagan’, but he strips it of its derogatory meaning and uses it with greater sensitivity to its origins (see also Bowersock, 1990: 6; Salzman 2002: 270–1). For some scholars, the notion that the term ‘pagan’ was, itself, a construction as a social category is attractive; Hedrick has willingly constructed ‘pagans’ as the end p.188

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Christians did, because, he argues, in part, this is what happened in late antiquity: ‘Paganism (as everyone agrees) comes into existence in late antiquity, precisely with the rise of Christianity to a position of political dominance. It is a creation of the dialectical opposition of two groups, but it is nonetheless socially real, and any account of the period must consider it’ (Hedrick 2000: 52). For North, ‘pagan’ has the advantage of being a known term; to introduce another term might well create even further confusion (North 2005: 135). Similarly problematic is the notion that there was one kind of Christian or one kind of Christianity (Mack 1995: 43–96). The numerous varieties of Christians in the Roman Empire, just as the numerous varieties of ‘pagans’, as well as those who fell between the two or shared in both cultic worlds, or in Judaism (that is, God-fearers; pagan Christians), should make scholars aware of the limits of assuming a deep divide in Roman society along clear-cut fault lines and speaking only in terms of the ‘conflict between pagans and Christians’. Moreover, scholars are more and more in agreement that ‘the church’ was little more than an abstraction in the first three centuries, ‘symbolizing a loosely linked confederation of local traditions that, by later standards, were exceptionally diverse in the concepts of correct practice and belief’ (Drake 2002: 363). Hence, ‘the church’ before Constantine was little able to draw such boundaries, and even after this emperor, neither it nor the state was easily able or willing to do so either.

9.1.2 Conflict or Accommodation and Assimilation in the First Three Centuries Perhaps the most disputed element in the traditional narrative is the central notion of conflict in characterizing pagan-Christian relations in the centuries

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before Constantine. Focusing on conflict reflects, first and foremost, the nature of our sources. There is little anti-Christian polemic that survives, but the Christian apologetic tradition provides a skewed picture of pagan-Christian relations, suggesting, as it does, Christians facing persecution and conflict without end. Indeed, pagans of the early Empire who mention Christians-notably Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, and Tacitus-allege the sorts of vices associated with many groups deemed deviant: arson, antisocial behaviour, cannibalism, and sexual irregularities like incest. Yet, such hostility and intolerance need not translate into political conflict on a daily basis. (For more on the bias in pre-Constantinian sources, see section 9.3.1 below and G. Clark 2005: 16–37). Second, traditional scholarly narratives focus on religious conflict precipitated by the Roman state or its emperor in explaining pagan-Christian relations. This simple top-down political conflict model of religious interaction and change does not take into account the complexity of social and cultural ties that existed between pagans, Christians, Jews, God-fearers, and the like in the Roman Empire. In a world end p.189

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved in which these groups lived side by side and interacted on a daily basis and with far less violence than the apologetic sources would suggest, scholars have seen it as increasingly important to consider religion within its social and local contexts, and to take into account how Christians and pagans influenced each other. This approach has been in part inspired by the social sciences, especially anthropology. W. Meeks's study The First Urban Christians (1983) was paradigmatic of this new approach and highly influential. His book examined the ‘Social World of the Apostle Paul’ and the spread of Christianity in the early Empire against the backdrop of an ordinary person's life in specific Roman cities through the lens of social theory and ‘moderate functionalism’ (1983: 1–8). E. A. Clark (1992) used social network theory to explain the spread of Origen's ideas in the Roman Empire. Lane Fox's book, Pagans and Christians (1987), examined the interactions of these two groups within local, historical contexts, although he too devoted much of his analysis of pagan-Christian relations to moments of conflict represented by the spectacular martyrdoms of Christians (Lane Fox 1987: 419–92). Indeed, the impact of martyrdom on pagans and Christians remains a central focus of study in analysing the interaction of these two groups, although the approaches to martyrdom have similarly benefited from more nuanced social and literary theory (Barton 1993; Bowersock 1995; Castelli 2004). Dissatisfaction with a top-down view of pagan-Christian relations that focuses on conflict has led scholars to re-examine the link between the emperors and these religions. The limits of imperial power have been emphasized in this area, as in others (Salzman 2002: 178–99; compare Millar 1977: 3–12). So, in a groundbreaking article, Rives has argued that the third century saw a new emphasis on universalizing religiosity, represented by Decius's edict (Rives 1999). New notions of the role of religion in Roman society had, in his view, taken hold over the course of the third century. Decius's persecution was, consequently, not an arbitrary top-down policy, as Christian authors have tended to view it, but rather, a response to pre-existing changed notions. Hence, imperial law followed a more general shift in society and religion. Rives's argument reflects, too, the growing emphasis on what pagans and Christians shared concerning Roman culture. The limits of explaining religious change and pagan-Christian relations solely in terms of imperial influence are highlighted by Rives's work and his shift of perspective on the persecution of Christians in the third century.

9.1.3 Constantine's Reign as a Turning Point in Pagan-Christian

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Relations Constantine's reign looms large still; but while most scholars can agree that his reign represents a turning point in any narrative of pagan-Christian relations, the direction in which he turned, his point of departure, and his impact have been end p.190

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved much contested. Even the terms of the scholarly debate surrounding Constantine have noticeably shifted. In the late nineteenth and into the middle of the twentieth century, the focus was on Constantine's motives for conversion. J. Burckhardt's biography depicted a politically savvy Constantine, playing to the masses of Christians and cynically employing them for his own ends (Burckhardt 1880; 2nd edn. 1949). Early twentieth-century scholars argued over Constantine as a confused pagan syncretist (Piganiol 1932) or an evolving Christian syncretist (J. R. Palanque 1949; Alföldi 1948). While some scholars may still argue about Constantine's motives, most have increasingly moved away from the fruitless debate about Constantine's sincerity to ask more productive questions concerning the kind of Christianity that Constantine embraced and his impact on pagan-Christian relations. On this, however, there is no consensus. Two recent biographies of Constantine exemplify the divergence in scholarship. According to C. M. Odahl, Constantine was an earnest religious reformer, intent on converting the Empire (2004). H. A. Drake, however, sees Constantine more as a pragmatic politician, searching for religious equilibrium in his laws and in his attempts at mediating between Christians; for Drake, Constantine unleashed religious forces outside his control unwittingly, as he was aiming to unify the Empire, not divide it along pagan-Christian lines (2000). These two scholars differ, too, on their use of the key source for Constantine: namely, Eusebius's Life of Constantine. Odahl takes Eusebius more or less at his word; Drake, however, sees Eusebius's Life as shaped by his polemical and political intentions, and these, in turn, colour his reporting. Depending, then, on how one reads Eusebius, scholars reach differing conclusions about how effective and aggressive Constantine was in repressing pagans as he advanced Christians. The issue is not his support for Christians-of that there is certainty-but how much his policies set pagans and Christians at odds with one another, and how aggressively the Emperor attacked pagans and their institutions.

9.1.4 After Constantine: Conflict or Accommodation and Assimilation? It remains a disputed question how best to characterize pagan-Christian relations in the century after Constantine. A. Momigliano's seminal collection of essays emphasized conflict even in its title: The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (1963). In an influential paper expanding on his 1945 essay, H. Bloch argued for a pagan reaction and revival in the West at the end of the fourth century (Bloch 1963). Bloch made his argument based on a wide range of evidence, much of it now familiar-that is, the documents on the Altar of Victory controversy, texts written against pagans, most notably the Carmen contra paganos, epigraphy, subscriptions to Livy, the Saturnalia of Macrobius, end p.191

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© Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved the Nicomachorum/Symmachorum diptychs, and the usurpation of Eugenius and Arbogastes-but it all pointed to a party of Roman aristocrats leading a pagan revival in reaction to increasingly hostile Christian imperial pressures. This interpretation of the late fourth century as one of sharp pagan-Christian conflict sat well with Bloch's generation of scholars who had lived through the Second World War. Bloch's position has been undermined by a new generation of scholars, influenced in large measure by Peter Brown's important 1961 article ‘Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy’, and by a series of articles by Alan Cameron, beginning with his innovative 1966 article that re-dated the Saturnalia of Macrobius to the 430s rather than the 390s (Cameron 1966); both Brown and Cameron advanced a revisionist view of the fourth century that focused on the processes of accommodation and assimilation, rather than conflict, in explaining, among other things, the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Inspired by this revisionist perspective, scholars re-examined and reinterpreted many of the same events, texts, and artefacts advanced by Bloch as evidence for conflict. For example, in a series of articles, O'Donnell has argued that the rebellion of Eugenius and Arbogast (392–4 CE) that ended in their defeat at the battle at the river Frigidus in 394 was a conflict about dynastic legitimacy, not religious difference; Eugenius (nominally a Christian) had fought for recognition from Theodosius as Emperor in the West (O'Donnell 1979).1 Reassessing the religious dimension of the usurpation of Eugenius and Arbogastes also highlights one of our best-documented instances of fourth-century pagan-Christian conflict: namely, the controversy concerning the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Roman senate house. For Bloch, the alleged return of this altar by Eugenius at the request of the pagan aristocrat Flavianus was a clear sign that religion was at the heart of the usurpation (Bloch 1963: 195–7; Paulinus of Milan, Life of Ambrose, 26). But McLynn, for one, has argued contra that the return of the altar was a political move, granted by Eugenius only after he entered Italy and abandoned all hopes of winning Theodosius's support (McLynn 1994: 344–6). And Cameron has argued that even the initial request to return the altar, preserved in Symmachus's famous Third State Paper and countered in Letters 17 and 18 by the bishop Ambrose, was motivated not so much by religious concerns as by the preservation of Roman traditions of tolerance, a position that suggests a pagan side intent on coexistence and accommodation, not conflict (Alan Cameron 1984). As Cameron sees it, the Christians, not the pagans, turned the altar into a religious cause célèbre. Religious conflict, such as it was, according to Cameron, was one-sided; we do not have pagan voices raised in opposition, not because these voices were suppressed, but because pagans in general were too apathetic to write in opposition (Alan Cameron 1984: 45). A reaction to Cameron's accommodationist view of late Roman pagans' position has emerged among scholars who have come to question the passivity of pagans and this binary vision of pagan-Christian relations as either conflict or accommodation and assimilation; C. Hedrick, jun., for one, has argued that ‘Religious assimilation end p.192

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved and conflict are not mutually exclusive, but are two faces of the same coin. Both are a reaction to a social tension, a religious differentiation, and it is necessary to read each in light of the other, not to choose one over the other’' (Hedrick 2000: 50). Similarly, I have argued that religion was part of a late Roman aristocrat's status, culture, and social identity; separating out religion from that identity was

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a prolonged task, requiring negotiation and reformulation of elite values over the course of the fourth century (Salzman 2002: 61–5). These are but two works that reflect the importance of taking into account the ways in which religion was entwined in all elements of social and political life in the Roman world; to try to remove it entirely from understanding the history and movements of this period is anachronistic. But scholars dispute-and where Hedrick and I disagree-the degree to which they see religion as the key motivating factor in events. So, for example, Hedrick has argued for religious motivation in the events leading up to the battle at the Frigidus (Hedrick 2000: 42–6, 50–1, 85). Indeed, for Hedrick, this is true, since ‘cultural behaviour of all kinds is coherent’ (p. 50 ); even the act of emending pagan texts is part of the broader cultural discourse and hence holds significance as part of a ‘pagan’ ideology, albeit indirectly (p. 202 ). While I would agree that religion is embedded in late Roman life, this does not mean that religion should always be taken as the primary, causal factor in all events; emperors, for example, chose military leaders for a host of reasons, not necessarily having to do with religion (Salzman 2002: 192–3). Assessing the impact of religious motivation is especially difficult, since the Christians controlled the media; in the case of Eugenius's rebellion, no pagan texts survive. Only after the event do we have interpretations, almost entirely from Christians, and these texts are often biased and hence unreliable (Hedrick 2000: 49). For some scholars, like Hedrick, what is key is the way in which these texts control the construction of the past. So, Hedrick claims, even if ‘Flavianus, Eugenius, and Arbogast did not see themselves as leading a pagan revolt against Christianity in 394, the usurpation was constructed as a religious rebellion in the years following their demise’ (Hedrick 2000: 71–2). Hence Hedrick would elide religious motivation with religious reconstruction; such an elision is not satisfying to historians who see it still as their task to assess the causes of events. Recent scholarship has moved away from the simple binary model of social relations and political religious conflict that characterized traditional narratives on pagan-Christian relations. Most fruitful have been recent re-examinations of the most extreme forms of alleged pagan-Christian conflict: namely, those involving violence. The sources-mostly Christian-from the post-Constantinian world offer many instances of violence motivated by religion. This evidence has led some scholars, like MacMullen, to argue that violence and coercion were necessary and significant factors in converting pagans to Christianity in the fourth and early fifth centuries (MacMullen 1986: 86–101; 1997: 1–73). Violence was essential since, by end p.193

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved most estimates, Christians were no more than a 10 percent minority in the Empire at the beginning of the reign of Constantine (MacMullen 1986; Stark 1996: 6). Other scholars have been hesitant to place so much emphasis on violence as the predominant factor in the conversion of pagans; they underscore a wider range of social and cultural factors in explaining religious change, and in paganChristian relations in general (compare Gaddis 2005; Mc Lynn 1992; Salzman 2006; Trombley 1993–4). One of the most promising examples of this approach that breaks away from a strictly binary model of social relations is J. Hahn's source-critical analysis of alleged religious violence that occurred in four cities from the years 312–425 CE: Alexandria, Antioch, Gaza, and Panopolis. His main conclusion is, I think, important; he finds that religious violence is not the norm, but rather the exception in late antiquity; religious conflicts were nearly always mingled with other problems-economic, social, political, generational (Hahn

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2004: 292). In most cities, pagans, Christians, and Jews lived side by side in relatively peaceful coexistence. Hahn arrived at this through a careful analysis of the sources, which, in his view, indicate a Christian tradition that focuses on religious violence and conflict, but which is, essentially a ‘reduktionistische... Perspektive’ (Hahn 2004: 275). Studies such as Hahn's indicate the necessity of detailed, source-critical research; but his work also underscores the importance of integrating social and cultural factors along with the political and theological issues in explaining pagan-Christian relations in a local context. Finally, the traditional view of Christianity triumphant by the late fourth century can no longer be accepted at face value. Trombley, for one (1993–4: 1–97, 380–6), has demonstrated in abundant detail the resilience of paganism and how differently pagan cults were Christianized in various parts of the eastern empire at different times. Moreover, this process unfolded through to the early sixth century.

9.2 New Directions Scholars in search of a more nuanced understanding of pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire have re-examined not only the sources, but also their reliance on the conflict model. More and more, scholars have turned their attention to what pagans and Christians shared in religion and society. Consequently, scholars have studied such areas of ancient life as friendship networks, patronage ties, education, commerce, family bonds, and artefacts in assessing the nature of pagan-Christian relations. This focus on shared social and cultural elements represents to me an undeniable advance over previous generations of scholars who focused almost exclusively on political conflict to chart the relations between pagans and Christians. The incorporation of social and cultural factors alongside political and theological issues to gain a more balanced perspective is one of the key shifts in the study of pagan-Christian relations in the past 35 years. any of the studies noted end p.194

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved above exemplify this approach (e.g. Frankfurter 1998; MacMullen 1986; McLynn 1994), but much work remains to be done. To mention but one area, the texts of Gnostics, Chaldaean oracles, and Neoplatonic thinkers show quite clearly that there was much common ground between pagans and Christians (Athanassiadi 1999; Frede 1999). Scholars who have studied late Platonism in relation to Christian theology have discussed this connection particularly well (Armstrong 1990; O'Daly 2001). But mapping out common ground between pagans and Christians on specific issues-such as attitudes toward deity, death, monotheism, rituals, festivals, to name but a few-remains a desideratum. Finally, the social and cultural elements shared by pagans and Christians need to be studied within specific geographic and chronological parameters. So, for example, expectations for women likely affected pagan-Christian relations in the East differently from those in the West. And civic structures affected the role of the bishop in the East differently from those in the West, and varied too between large and small cities. Only through nuanced studies that locate pagan-Christian relations within specific historical contexts will we be able to understand the forces that mediated the vertical, political forces for religious conflict and change.

9.3 Sources

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9.3.1 Textual Sources before Constantine Given the growing awareness of the limits on categories of ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ and the fluidity of religious identity in the first three centuries of the Empire, scholars have become increasingly sensitive to the ways in which they interpret the sources for pagans and Christians. Here, dates do matter; Christian apologists in the centuries before Constantine were writing in a world in which they could be martyred for their faith. In defence of their religion, Christians in the East, like Justin Martyr and Tatian, and in the West, Minucius Felix, defended their practices even though, as Edwards has argued, we cannot know if the defence they offered responded to specific attacks (Edwards, Goodman, and Price 1999: 1–14). Indeed, we do not even know whether or how many other works, now lost, attacked Christianity. And, as King has argued, one of the principal aims of the apologists was the construction of Christian identity and the spreading of their religion (King 2003: 22–40). In sharp contrast, non-Christians-that is, pagans-did not consider Christians and Christianity as key factors in constructing their social identity in the first and second centuries. Only a small group of early second-century texts by pagans mention Christians. Suetonius, who served in the administration of the emperor end p.195

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Hadrian, included two references to Christians in his Lives of the Emperors Claudius (24. 5) and Nero (16. 2). In the latter, he notes that Christians were ‘followers of a new and wicked superstition’ (superstitio nova ac malefica). The early second-century historian Tacitus, governor of the province of Asia under Trajan, describes the Christians who were scapegoated for Nero's fire in 64 CE as members of a deadly cult (exitiabilis superstitio) and adds the intriguing note that the Christians were ‘hated for their crimes’ (flagitia; Annals 15. 44). Similarly, the younger Pliny, who wrote to the emperor Trajan in 112 CE, called Christianity a ‘perverse and excessive superstition’ (superstitio prava et immodica; Ep. 10. 96). To these second-century pagans, Christianity was a superstitio, an excessive and unacceptable new cult, barely worth noting except as a potential threat to public safety (Beard, Price, and North 1998: i. 217–28). The first pagan author we know of who took Christianity seriously enough to write a philosophical polemic against it is Celsus. The True Doctrine, written probably between 175 and 181 CE, is primarily known through Origen's Contra Celsum, itself written c. 240 CE. Similarly, the Neoplatonist Porphyry, writing at the end of the third century, directed some fifteen books against Christians (perhaps part of a longer work); since these were burned under Constantine, what we know of his argument is through Christian writers, especially Eusebius and Augustine, who quoted Porphyry to attack him. Hence, scholars have had to reconstruct pagan attitudes toward Christians in the first through the third centuries largely as refracted through Christian apologetic works. This fact has certain important implications: for one, scholars cannot assume that the Christian apologists' depiction of relations between pagans and Christians represents simple historical reality. Indeed, the rhetorical ends of these texts need to be considered, and, as Edwards (Edwards, Goodman, and Price 1999) has well argued, the connection of Christian apologetic to the contemporary world needs further examination. One way to address the limitations of the texts is to turn to non-textual sources, notably art and architecture. This is also true in the later centuries (see section 9.3.3).

9.3.2 Textual Sources from the Age of Constantine and After One of the key elements in the shift in the scholarship on Constantine has been

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an awareness of the fruitlessness of trying to reconstruct Constantine's original religious intent based on our sources; our best text for these intentions, Eusebius's Life of Constantine, was written as a panegyric, then revised by Eusebius into a biography intended to highlight Constantine's religious role, including citations of the Emperor's laws and letters on behalf of the Church but written in such a way as to avoid offending his successors. Yet, Eusebius's personal contact with the Emperor was limited to four public occasions (Barnes 1981: 265–7). After Eusebius died in 339 CE, the Life was published by a redactor who did little to change its content end p.196

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved (Pasquali 1910). Given the circumstances of its composition and posthumous publication for hagiographic reasons and to influence Constantine's successor, the veracity of the Life as a source has been very differently interpreted (see section 9.1.3). In order to balance the views of Eusebius, scholars have turned to a wide variety of textual documents. Constantine's Letters, many of them included in Eusebius's Life, have at times been the focus of attention (e.g. Baynes 1972). Other scholars have focused on the law codes of Constantine and his successors that survive in the Code of Theodosius and in the Code and Novels of Justinian. Yet, these laws, as recent studies have shown, were shaped both by their original collectors and by the nature of their transmission and reconstruction (Harries and Wood 1993; Matthews 2000). Hence, scholars who use these laws for paganChristian relations need to be aware of the ways in which the complex transmission of these codes shaped the modern texts they use. Moreover, scholars must also acknowledge the prescriptive nature of Roman law; laws do not necessarily indicate lived reality and often lag behind it (Salzman 1993). The same caveats apply to scholars who turn to the canons of the church councils that bear on pagan-Christian relations. For the age of Constantine and continuing into the fifth century, there survive many textual sources to reconstruct pagan-Christian relations. Most of these sources were written by Christians. They include a wide range of documents, ranging from the private letter collections of key Christian figures-such as Jerome, Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose of Milan, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea-to the public pronouncements of prominent people, as preserved by their sermons and theological tracts. Christian apologists continued to write into the fifth century; even though pagan sacrifice and cult rituals were outlawed, Christian writers still felt that they had to defend Christianity by explaining, as did Augustine in his City of God, why disasters befell a now Christian empire. It is from the fourth century that we have, understandably, our clearest pagan responses to the growing number of Christians in their midst. In addition to the Third State Paper (Relatio) by Symmachus, written in response to the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Roman senate house in 384 CE, we also have the pagan emperor Julian's work Against the Galilaeans. These are central texts for examining the pagan view of Christianity. Indeed, the fourth century saw a revival of Latin literature and history, much of it of use in examining pagan and Christian relations (Alan Cameron 1984).

9.3.3 Non-textual Sources To assess pagan-Christian relations, scholars have been willing to look beyond texts to incorporate epigraphic and numismatic as well as archaeological evidence. For the age of Constantine and after, this is rich indeed. The discussion of the usurpation of Eugenius as pagan-Christian conflict above is exemplary; the

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scholarship end p.197

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved revolved around a wide range of sources, including inscriptions and the Nicomachorum/Symmachorum diptychs as well as the letters of Ambrose and the State Papers of the pagan Symmachus on the Altar of Victory controversy. Artefacts, such as the Codex-Calendar of 354 and the Esquiline Treasury help to reconstruct the daily lives of pagans and Christians and show how much they indeed shared one world (Salzman 1990; Elsner 1998). In dealing with this wealth of information, historians have to be aware of the genres and traditions of the material evidence; yet the richness of these and of the textual remains allow for creative scholarship not possible in dealing with other periods of ancient religion. end p.198

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Notes 1.

O'Donnell (1979) also pointed out several other problems with the revolt when viewed as a conflict narrative, including the fact that the number of pagans involved in this revolt is unattested, and no pagan aristocrat other than Flavianus is named; after the defeat, only Flavianus appears to have chosen suicide over surrender (Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 2. 33). Bibliography

ALFÖLDI, A. (1948), The Conversion of Constantine and Pagan Rome, trans. H. Mattingly (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ARMSTRONG, A. H. (1990), Hellenic and Christian Studies (Aldershot: Variorum; Brookfield, Vt.: Gower Publishers). ATHANASSIADI, P. (1999), ‘The Chaldaean Oracles: Theology and Theurgy’, in Athanassiadi and Frede (1999), 149–84. —— and Frede, M. (1999) (eds.), Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). BARNES, T. D. (1981), Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). BARTON, Carlin A. (1993), The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton: Princeton University Press). BEARD, M., NORTH, J., and PRICE, S. (1998), Religions of Rome, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). BAYNES, N. H. (1972), Constantine the Great and the Christian Church, with a

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preface by H. Chadwick. Originally published as Proceedings of the British Academy, 1929 (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2nd edn. (1st edn. repr.)), 341–442. BLOCH, H. (1945), ‘A New Document of the Last Pagan Revival in the West’, HTR 38: 199– 244. —— (1963), ‘The Pagan Revival in the West at the End of the Fourth Century’, in Momigliano (1963), 193–217. BOWERSOCK, G. W. (1990), Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). —— (1995), Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

BROWN, P. (1961), ‘Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy’, JRS 51: 1–11. BURCKHARDT, J. (1880), Die Zeit Konstantins des Grossen, trans. M. Hadas, The Age of Constantine the Great (New York: Dorset Press, 1989, orig. 1949).

CAMERON, Alan (1966), ‘The Date and Identity of Macrobius’, JRS 54: 25–38.

end p.199

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved CAMERON, Alan (1984), ‘The Latin Revival of the Fourth Century’, in W. Treadgold (ed.), Renaissances before the Renaissance: Cultural Revivals of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press), 42–58.

CAMERON, Averil (1993), The Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). —— and HALL, S. (1999), Eusebius: Life of Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press). CASTELLI, E. (2004), Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press). CHUVIN, Pierre (1990), A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, trans. B. A. Archer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). CLARK, E. A. (1992), The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

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CLARK, G. (2005), Christianity and Roman Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). CROKE, B., and HARRIES, J. (1982), Religious Conflict in Fourth Century Rome (Sydney: Sydney University Press). DRAKE, H. (1996), ‘Lambs into Lions: Explaining Early Christian Intolerance’, Past and Present, 153: 3–36. —— (2000), Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). —— (2002), ‘A Response to Liz Clark’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 55: 363–8.

EDWARDS, M., GOODMAN, M., and PRICE, S. (1999) (editors in association with Christopher Rowland), Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews and Christians (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ELSNER, J. (1998), Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph (Oxford: Oxford University Press). FOWDEN, G. (1993), Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press). FRANKFURTER, D. (1998), Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press). FREDE, M. (1999), ‘Monotheism and Pagan Philosophy in Later Antiquity’, in Athanassiadi and Frede (1999), 41–68. FREDRIKSEN, P. (2005), Review of G. Clark (2005), JECS 13: 532. FREND, W. H. C. (1981), Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from Maccabees to Donatus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House; originally Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965). GADDIS, M. (2005), There is No Crime for Those who have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press).

HAHN, J. (2004), Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt: Studien zu den Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Christen, Heiden und Juden im Osten des Römischen Reiches (von Konstantin bis Theodosius II), Beiträge zur Alten Geschichte, Beihefte.

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8 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag).

HARRIES, J., and Wood, I. (1993) (eds.), The Theodosian Code (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). HEDRICK, C. Jr. (2000), History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in

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Late Antiquity (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press). HILLGARTH, J. N. (1986), Christianity and Paganism, 350–750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). end p.200

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved KING, K. (2003), What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). KIRSCH, J. (2004), God against the Gods: The History of the War between Monotheism and Polytheism (New York: Viking Press). LANE FOX, R. (1987), Pagans and Christians (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).

LEE, D. (2000), Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge).

MAAS, M. (2000), Readings in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge). MACK, B. (1995), Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco). MACMULLEN, R. (1983), Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press). —— (1986), Christianizing the Roman Empire, A.D. 100–400 (New Haven: Yale University Press). —— (1997), Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press). MARKUS, R. A. (1990), The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). MATTHEWS, J. F. (2000), Laying down the Law: A Study of the Theodosian Code (New Haven: Yale University Press). MCLYNN, N. (1992), ‘Christian Controversy and Violence in the Fourth Century’, Kodai, 2: 15–44. —— (1994), Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press). MEEKS, W. (2003), The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle

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Paul, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press). MILLAR, F. (1977), The Emperor in the Roman World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). MITCHELL, S. (1999), ‘The Cult of Theos Hypsistos between Pagans, Jews and Christians’, in Athanassiadi and Frede (1999), 81–148. Momigliano, A. (1963) (ed.), The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press). NORTH, J. (2005), ‘Pagans, Polytheists, and the Pendulum,’ in W. V. Harris (ed.), The Spread of Christianity in the First Four Centuries: Essays in Explanation (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 125–43. ODAHL, C. M. (2004), Constantine and the Christian Empire (New York: Routledge). O'DALY , G. (2001), Platonism Pagan and Christian: Studies in Plotinus and Augustine (Aldershot: Ashgate). O'DONNELL, J. J. (1977), ‘Paganus’, Classical Folia, 31: 163–9. —— (1979), ‘The Demise of Paganism’, Traditio, 35: 43–88. —— (2002), A review of Salzman (2002), BMCR 2002.06.04; . PASQUALI, G. (1910), ‘Die composition der Vita Constantini des Eusebius’, Hermes, 45: 368–86. PHARR, C. (1952), The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitiutions: Translation, with Commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press). PIGANIOL, A. (1932), L'Empereur Constantin (Paris: Rieder). RIVES, J. (1999), ‘The Decree of Decius and the Religion of the Empire’, JRS 89: 135–54. SALZMAN, M. R. (1990), On Roman Time: The Codex-Calendar of 354 and the Rhythms of Urban Life in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press).

—— (1993), ‘The Evidence for the Conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in the Theodosian Code’, Historia, 42: 362–78. end p.201

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© Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved SALZMAN, M. R. (2002), The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

—— (2006), ‘Re-thinking Pagan—Christian Religious Violence’, in H. A. Drake (ed.), Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices [based on papers presented at the fifth biennial Conference on Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity, held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 20–3 March 2003] (Aldershot: Ashgate), 265–85. Scott, S. P. (1973), The Civil Law, including the Twelve Tables, the Institutes of Gaius, the Rules of Ulpian, the Opinions of Paulus, the Enactments of Justinian, and the Constitutions of Leo: Translated from the Original Latin, Edited, and Compared with all Accessible Systems of Jurisprudence Ancient and Modern (New York: AMS Press; originally published in 1932 by The Central Trust Company, Cincinnati, Ohio). SHERWIN-WHITE, A. N. (1964), ‘Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?—An Amendment’, Past and Present, 27: 23–7. STARK, R. (1996), The Rise of Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

STE. CROIX, G. E. M. de (1963), ‘Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?’, Past and Present, 26: 6–31. —— (1964), ‘Why were the Christians Persecuted?—A Rejoinder’, Past and Present, 27: 28–33. TROMBLEY , F. R. (1993–4), Hellenic Religion and Christianization c.370–529 CE, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, 115, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill).

Valantasis, R. (2000) (ed.), Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice, Princeton Readings in Religions (Princeton: Princeton University Press). end p.202

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [203]-[220]

10 ‘Gnosticism’

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The major part of research for this article was carried out during a period of study at Yale Divinity School in the spring of 2006. The opportunity was made possible by a grant from the Academy of Finland. Antti Marjanen Abstract: Approaches to Gnosticism – Sources – Challenges for the Study of ‘Gnosticism’ Keywords: Christ, Christian

10.1 Approaches to Gnosticism THE state of research into what is traditionally called ‘Gnosticism’, a religious phenomenon of late antiquity,1 is opaque or even confusing at the moment. In a recent collection of essays on the topic, two prominent scholars approach the topic of ‘Gnosticism’ in very different ways. Birger Pearson states: ‘in answer to the question posed by the theme of this [volume], “Was There a Gnostic Religion?” my reply is: Yes there was, and it still exists’ (Pearson 2005 b: 101). Michael Williams, in turn, concludes with the comment: ‘Louis Painchaud recently expressed the opinion that it is increasingly apparent that full advantage of the study of Nag Hammadi and related texts will be realized only when one “dims the switch” (mettre en veilleuse) on the category Gnosticism. I would say we should at least consider turning it off completely, to see what might only then be visible in the natural light of the sources themselves’ (Williams 2005b: 79). In a footnote Williams specifies his view even more pointedly: I only allude with the metaphor to a position that I do hold strongly, that the most common current framework—the category ‘Gnosticism’ in its conventional forms—has indeed become very obstructive to our reading of the actual content of our sources. Whether it can ever adequately be reshaped by new analysis of these sources, or whether at this stage it is merely in the way, is one of the important issues in debate here. end p.203

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved The two views presented above well illustrate that in the current scholarly discussion no consensus prevails as to how the religious category or phenomenon ‘Gnosticism’ is to be conceived or even employed. Therefore, every treatment or usage of the term ‘Gnosticism’ has to be accompanied by a definition of its content and some clarification of the purpose for which the term is being used.

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However, before suggesting parameters for a modern study of ‘Gnosticism’, it will be helpful to see how the phenomenon has been perceived in the past. In the history of the study of ‘Gnosticism’, there have basically been three ways to approach this religious phenomenon. The first represents an ancient view, contemporary with the assumed genesis of ‘Gnosticism’. The other two are later scholarly products.

10.1.1 Heresiological Approach Although the early Christian theologians of the second, third, and fourth centuries, most notably Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, did not use the term ‘Gnosticism’,2 they referred to contemporary religious thinkers and groups that they called ‘gnostics’ or that, according to them, gave themselves this title (Marjanen 2005: 10–24). In their presentations, these church fathers do provide excerpts of the mythological accounts as well as information on doctrines and religious practices of various religious groups they regard as ‘gnostics’. Common to these groups is at least a separation between the Highest God and the creator, a dichotomy between the human body and the divine soul embedded in it, and an idea of saving knowledge (gn sis). Nonetheless, the primary purpose of the descriptions of the church fathers is not to give an analytical and systematic—let alone unbiased—picture of the ‘gnostics’. On the contrary, they serve to point out the heretical character of the teachings and practices of these religious opponents. Thus, the writings of the church fathers tend to depict such features—real, caricatured, or even imaginary—which make ‘gnostics’ appear to be both ridiculous and dangerous. Irenaeus wrote the first extant heresiological work, Refutation and Overthrow of What is Falsely Called Gnosis, commonly known as Against Heresies (c.180 CE). He laid out the basic strategy against ‘gnostics’ which some of the later heresiologists would also use in their polemics. First of all, it was important to Irenaeus to show that the origin of all heresies could be ascribed to a single figure of dubious reputation. Irenaeus's candidate for that role was Simon Magus, who was known to be a Christian convert but whose attempt to buy the authority to impart the gift of the Holy Spirit rendered him suspect in the eyes of the readers, especially when Irenaeus failed to say anything about his repentance, mentioned by Luke in Acts 8 (Haer. 1. 23. 1). Simon's position as an arch-heretic was further corroborated by the fact that Irenaeus informed his readers that Simon Magus had followers in Rome who regarded him as a god. end p.204

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Second, Irenaeus argued for a clearly observable genealogy of heretical movements, starting with Simon, continuing with various ‘gnostic’ teachers and groups, and ending up with his main adversaries, the Valentinians (King 2003: 31–2). The use of the genealogy metaphor gave Irenaeus and his later fellow heresiologists a powerful weapon in their struggle against their opponents. As John Henderson has pointed out, the genealogy of heresy ‘gave order and coherence to a very puzzling and diverse set of phenomena by linking them together in a chain of succession.... The genealogy of heresy having been established, later heresiologists found it both effective and economical to attack later heresies by linking them with already refuted and discredited earlier ones’ (1998: 151–2). Irenaeus's third strategical move was to place all important heresies under the same umbrella by calling them by the same name. This made it easier to refute their views, because it could be done collectively. The name Irenaeus chose for this purpose was ‘gnostics’. Although he seemed to know a particular heretical

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group which he called by this name (Haer. 1. 29–30), in the course of his writing he could also expand the scope of the term to include other religious groups and persons, such as the Basilideans, the Carpocratians, the adherents of Saturninus, and finally even Marcion, Valentinus, Simon Magus himself, as well as Menander (Marjanen 2005: 11–12). Fourth, Irenaeus wanted to emphasize the mutual divergences of various ‘gnostic’ groups. This served to demonstrate that the heretics lacked any kind of social and doctrinal unity (King 2003: 31). It was no problem, for example, to say that some ‘gnostics’ believed that the world was created by angels (Haer. 3. 11. 2), whereas others insisted that the false father was the maker of heaven and earth (Haer. 4. 6.4). Irenaeus's heresiological approach to ‘Gnosticism’ was thus ‘to show that the gnostics had a common origin and name, they formed a chain of heretical succession, but in reality they were a quarrelling bunch of people who, above all, did not share the apostolic origin and teaching’ (Marjanen 2005: 13). Irenaeus's followers, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius, added to this characterization an additional polemical note. They argued that the real inspiration of the ‘gnostics’ lay in pagan philosophy. Not even Clement of Alexandria, who could use the term ‘gnostic’ for a spiritually advanced Christian, saw anything positive in a false ‘gnostic’. For him, like his predecessors and fellow heresiologists, this kind of gnostic was nothing but a heretic par excellence.

10.1.2 Typological Approach Along with the Enlightenment, the scope of the study of ‘Gnosticism’ changed. Although the heresiological concerns did not entirely vanish, as emphatically pointed out by Karen King (2003, 2005), scientifically more acceptable approaches began to develop. The first scientific studies of ‘Gnosticism’ were mostly interested in its end p.205

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved origins. These genealogical approaches could see ‘Gnosticism’ either as part of the intra-Christian development or as a non- or extra-Christian phenomenon which eventually infiltrated or affected the Christian religion. For example, they could demonstrate that the conversion of Jesus' uncomplicated and genuine faith into a philosophical and ascetic ‘gnostic’ religion was due to the influence of the Hellenistic spirit (Harnack) or that ‘Gnosticism’ was a pre-Christian religious movement which had its roots in ancient Persian religion and which also underlay many early Christian conceptions (Bousset, Reitzenstein). The genealogical approaches were a necessary forerunner of the typological characterizations which became the most important twentieth-century approach to ‘Gnosticism’. The typological approach to ‘Gnosticism’ considers it an independent religion or religious movement with definable doctrinal and social characteristics. Although typological definitions are reached by making observations on a certain set of ancient religious texts, they serve as overarching theoretical models which are assigned to understand and explain individual features in various ‘gnostic’ texts and groups representing the ‘gnostic’ religion. A thorough characterization of the basic features of ‘Gnosticism’ was presented already by Adolf Harnack (1961: i. 257–62; King 2003: 62–3; Marjanen 2005: 34), but it was some 50 years ago when the most influential typology of ‘Gnosticism’ was produced. When Hans Jonas wrote his seminal overall presentation of ‘Gnosticism’, he styled his work The Gnostic Religion (1963), thus suggesting that, in addition to Christianity and Judaism, the Hellenistic world

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became a matrix of a third religion which utilized traditions of the Hebrew Bible. Although Jonas recognized that the ‘gnostic religion’ consisted of various factions and currents, he insisted not only that they could be brought together under a common heading but also that they shared main religious tenets typical of them all. According to Jonas, ‘Gnosticism’ was characterized by eight basic features (Jonas 1963, 1967; Marjanen 2005: 42–4):3 (1) the idea of saving knowledge (gn sis), the content of which consists of transcendent history, including the events that led to the origin of the lower world; (2) the dynamic, emanative nature of the divine self which led to a history of devolution; (3) the mythical character of the gnostic thought presented not in a philosophical discourse but in a story; (4) a radically dualistic world-view manifesting itself in the sharp differentiation between the true God of the transcendent realm and the ignorant or evil creator of the lower world, as well as in the dichotomy between the human body and the divine self embedded in it; (5) the aggressive polemics it displays against other religious traditions, for example the Jewish conception of God; (6) the artificiality and non-originality of its myth; (7) the syncretistic character of its religious views; (8) the pneumatic morality, which may lead to either asceticism or libertinism. Jonas's typological approach to ‘Gnosticism’ has found a large following (Rudolph 1983; Markschies 2003; Meyer 2003; Pearson 2005b), although the nature and number of characteristics attached to the phenomenon may vary. Some end p.206

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved advocates of the typological approach may also accept that a ‘gnostic’ text, group, or thinker need not necessarily embrace all the features typical of ‘Gnosticism’. Therefore, some definitions of ‘Gnosticism’ may regard as ‘gnostic’, for example, the Gospel of Thomas, Marcion, and Hermetic writings, while others exclude them.

10.1.3 Self-Designation Approach Rather than concentrating on a set of typological features, Bentley Layton (1995) begins his approach to ‘Gnosticism’ with an observation that some ancient religious groups are said to have identified themselves as ‘gnostics’. Based on this, Layton suggests that, in the first centuries of the common era, there were historically and socially definable groups that not only were called ‘gnostics’ by their adversaries but that also used the term as a proper noun to characterize themselves. Thus, he starts his approach to ‘Gnosticism’ with the study of the testimonia about the use of this self-designation.4 By the aid of these testimonia, Layton identifies as ‘gnostics’ the ‘so-called “Knowledge-Supplying”’ school of thought' mentioned by Irenaeus in Haer. 1. 11. 1, as well as the Carpocratians in Haer. 1. 25. 6 and the ‘Barbelognostics’ in Haer. 1. 29, the ‘gnostics’ referred to by the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry (V. Plot. 16) and a non-Christian Middle Platonist Celsus (Origen, Cels. 5. 61), as well as Prodicus mentioned by Clement of Alexandria in Strom. 2. 117. 5 (Layton 1995: 338). After having established the basic set of testimonia about the ‘gnostics’, Layton uses the mythological material found in them, especially in that of the ‘Barbelognostics’ imparted by Irenaeus in Haer. 1. 29, to reconstruct the principal content of the ‘gnostic’ mythological teaching. By comparing it with the corresponding mythological data found in other relevant sources, Layton can expand his ‘gnostic’ evidence to include the Apocryphon of John, a Sethian or ‘Barbelognostic’ text found in three exemplars in the Nag Hammadi library and in

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one in the so-called Berlin Codex. Layton also points out that Porphyry refers to three Sethian texts: Zostrianos, the Book of Zoroaster (excerpted in the longer version of the Apocryphon of John), and Allogenes (discovered not long ago in the Nag Hammadi library), texts which the ‘gnostics’ in Rome used during the time of Plotinus. On the basis of these observations, Layton concludes that the so-called Sethian sources in the Nag Hammadi library and related documents, fourteen in number, and the Sethian system, identified and described for the first time by Hans-Martin Schenke (1974, 1981), should be considered ‘gnostic’. According to Layton, the fourteen ‘Sethian gnostic’ texts include the Apocryphon of John, the Book of Zoroaster (excerpted in the longer version of the Apocryphon of John), the Apocalypse of Adam, the Hypostasis of the Archons, the Trimorphic Protennoia, Thunder: Perfect Mind, the Gospel of the Egyptians, Zostrianos, Allogenes, the Three Steles of Seth, Marsanes, Melchizedek, the Thought of Norea, and the Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex (Layton 1995: 342–3). end p.207

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved A further step in Layton's approach is to trace additional material, comparable to the testimonia about the ‘gnostics’ and the fourteen Sethian texts, in order to increase ‘gnostic’ evidence, although that data may be ascribed to other religious mythmakers in the sources. In this way, Layton adds to his corpus of ‘Gnosticism’ Saturninus of Antioch, Epiphanius's ‘Gnostics’, Sethians, and Archontics, as well as the group called Audians by Theodore bar Koni.5 In its starting point, Layton's approach clearly disagrees with the typological approach. It is worth noting, however, that Layton and some modern representatives of the typological approach, such as Birger Pearson (2005 b), end up with a similar understanding of ‘Gnosticism’, with Sethian texts and the Sethian system at its core. To be sure, Pearson's typological categorization of ‘Gnosticism’ allows him to expand the phenomenon wider than Layton; therefore, he also includes in his definition of ‘Gnosticism’ at least Simon Magus, Menander, the Valentinians, the Mandeans (Pearson 2005b), and Basilides (Pearson 2005 a).

10.1.4 What Can Ancient ‘Gnosticism’ Mean Today? It is clear that of the three approaches sketched above, the heresiological one can no longer be legitimately adopted by modern ‘Gnosticism’ scholarship. In order to elevate one Christian tradition above all the others, the nascent ‘orthodoxy’ denigrated others by calling them heretical. In this process, the term ‘gnostic’ became practically synonymous with a ‘heretic’. In the Christian polemics of the first centuries, this kind of approach served survival needs. In modern scholarship, however, there is no justification for this sort of strategy. On the contrary, ancient alternative Christian movements need to be heard in their own right, both for their own sake and for a better understanding of the overall development of early Christianity. Not even the two modern approaches to ‘Gnosticism’, typological and self-designation, have escaped criticism. In his influential book, Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (1996), and in his later article (2005 b), Michael Williams sets out to challenge both approaches. The basic problem he sees with any typological definitions of ‘Gnosticism’ is that they do not do ‘justice to the diverse data that by scholarly convention have come to be lumped into this category’ (Williams 1996: 51). Williams provides many examples of the texts, usually thought to represent ‘Gnosticism’ or a

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‘gnostic’ religion, which at one or several points deviate from what is usually called ‘gnostic’ according to typological definitions. For instance, a so-called Sethian text, Marsanes 41. 30–42. 11, can contain an exhortation to contemplate the order of the cosmos and thus diverge from a radical anti-cosmism, a feature supposedly very typical of the so-called ‘gnostic’ attitude (Williams 2005 b: 69). In his criticism of Layton's approach, Williams points out that, given the important role that the self-designation ‘gnostics’ has in Layton's understanding of end p.208

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved ‘Gnosticism’ as an ancient historical phenomenon, it is astonishing that this self-designation appears only in heresiological testimonia, but nowhere in Nag Hammadi or other original sources. Layton defends his thesis by stressing that in the texts, which do not speak of second- and third-century school controversies but rather of primordial, eschatological, and metaphysical events and relationships, there is ‘no context in which a second-century school name such as Gnostikos might naturally occur’ (Layton 1995: 344). Layton's counter-argument is not very convincing, however, since in the ‘gnostic’ data base identified by him there are several other self-designations, such as ‘race of Seth’, ‘children of light’, ‘the immovable race’, which, despite Layton's objections, are hardly qualitatively different from ‘gnostikoi’. Based on his critical observations of typological and Layton's self-designation approaches, Michael Williams has suggested that the categories ‘Gnosticism’ or ‘a gnostic religion’ be abandoned altogether. Instead, one should accept that in the first centuries of the Common Era there developed various new religious movements which underlie the sources that scholars have customarily treated under the heading ‘Gnosticism’. Although some of these religious movements reveal common features and may even represent social continuity, many of them are so different from each other that to lump them together in one category ‘Gnosticism’ is more harmful than helpful for understanding them. Therefore, Williams recommends that rather than defining a single religion into which one must fit all available data, a more flexible and useful approach might be to identify common significant phenomenological features which various writings and traditions share and subject them to study. For Williams, a good example of this kind of feature is the notion of ‘demiurgy’, a motif that many scholars have regarded as a central hallmark of ‘Gnosticism’ in their typological definitions. Yet, the term ‘biblical demiurgical’, which for Williams is the characterization of ‘a teaching that ascribes the creation and management of the cosmos to some lower entity or entities, distinct from the highest divinity, and in the process incorporates or adapts traditions from Jewish or Christian scripture’ (Williams 2005b: 78), should not be considered just another label for ‘Gnosticism’. Rather, it is a heuristic category which functions as ‘a simple typology for organizing several religious innovations and new religious movements’ (Williams 1996: 265–6) without necessarily assuming other specific doctrinal or sociological connections between them. Williams's rejection of ‘Gnosticism’ as a label for an ancient religion is confirmed by Karen King, who also insists that there was no such thing as ‘Gnosticism’, ‘if we mean by that some kind of ancient religious entity with a single origin and distinct set of characteristics’ (King 2004: 653). For her, the term ‘belongs to the discourse of normative identity formation’. In this discourse—especially in its initial phase, but also later, including modern times—‘Gnosticism’ refers to all varieties of early Christianity that are characterized by too little or too negative an appropriation of Judaism, to any outside, non-Jewish contamination of pure

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end p.209

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Christianity or its pre-Christian roots, as well as to any tradition said to be closely related to this contaminated Christianity, whether or not they contain explicitly Christian elements (e.g. Hermeticism, Platonizing Sethianism, Mandaeism, and Manichaeism). ‘Gnosticism’ has thus become a problematic term, since ‘a rhetorical term has been confused with a historical entity’ (King 2003: 1). Behind the term there is nonetheless a variety of mostly unrelated individuals and groups, the study of whom and whose writings is of course possible and desirable, whether or not they are called ‘gnostic’. What kind of conclusions should one draw from Williams's and King's critical comments on the previous use and content of the term ‘Gnosticism’ for the future study of the texts traditionally called ‘gnostic’? Should the term ‘Gnosticism’ be dropped altogether as a misleading generalization which only hampers the genuine character of the individual texts from becoming evident? Or could the term be employed as a means of general classification, if its use and content were redefined? To be sure, Williams's proposal to turn ‘[the category “Gnosticism”] off completely, to see what might only then be visible in the natural light of the sources themselves’ (Williams 2005b: 79), is a valid alternative. Detailed analyses and intertextual comparisons of the texts, which contribute to our overall understanding of early Christianity as well as its components and development, are possible without making too hasty conclusions about their general theological character and perspective. Yet, although Michael Williams has expressed serious doubts about the possibility of defining the term ‘Gnosticism’ in such a manner that it could still be used in a meaningful and precise way, I will make a suggestion to that effect here. Even Williams admits that, in spite of remarkable differences, there are common characteristics among various texts and currents traditionally called ‘gnostic’. The fact that Williams can place a large number of texts normally called ‘gnostic’ in the category ‘biblical demiurgical’ on the basis that they contain a notion of (an) evil or ignorant world creator(s) separate from the highest divinity most clearly proves the point. In addition, he points out that many of the texts share another common feature; they presuppose that the human soul or spirit originates from a transcendental world and, having become aware of that, has the potential of returning there after life in this world (Williams 2005b: 78). I suggest that the combination of these two features found together in or presupposed by numerous texts and myths creates the prerequisite for classifying these texts and myths under the same heading. Without positing the existence of a distinct ‘gnostic’ religion or a common social context which would account for the origin of the texts, the texts can still be classified as ‘gnostic’. When this term is used, it should indeed be seen as a heuristic scholarly construct comprising the two main characteristics presented above. Understood in this bipolar way, ‘Gnosticism’ can be employed as a typologically defined category but, compared to previous typologies, in a minimalistic and more controllable sense. It is also important to emphasize that ‘Gnosticism’ cannot be used as an end p.210

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved analytical tool by which one interprets individual texts and their features. Rather, it is to be seen as a means by which one can group ancient religious texts and thinkers for closer analysis and comparison.

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Delineated in this bipolar manner, ‘Gnosticism’ is to be seen as a broader concept than in Layton's self-designation approach, but as a narrower term than in many traditional typological approaches. ‘Gnosticism’ can, for example, include Valentinian mythography, since that contains both a notion of an ignorant world creator and a pre-existent soul that has the potential of returning to a transcendent realm after having received the gnosis of its divine origin. On the other hand, the Gospel of Thomas cannot be regarded as ‘gnostic’, since it lacks the idea of a distinct creator. Marcion, in turn, made a clear distinction between the true God and the demiurge, but did not accept the ‘gnostic’ notion of the divine element within a human being; hence Marcion cannot be considered ‘gnostic’.

10.2 Sources Until the middle of the eighteenth century, when the first original ‘gnostic’ sources were discovered, the view of ‘Gnosticism’ was based solely on heresiological writings. Although highly polemical and not always trustworthy by nature, they still provide important complementary source material for the study of ‘Gnosticism’. The most important heresiological writers are Irenaeus of Lyons (c.115–c.,202), Clement of Alexandria (c.160–215), Tertullian (c.160–c.225), Origen (c.185–c.,253), Hippolytus of Rome (c.,170–236), Pseudo-Tertullian (3rd century), and Epiphanius (c.315–403). Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius have composed multi-volume, systematic refutations of contemporary ‘heresies’, and Pseudo-Tertullian presents a concise summary of heretical teachers and movements from Simon Magus to Praxeas. Apart from Pseudo-Tertullian, the others also quote some important original sources. Irenaeus, for example, summarizes a ‘gnostic’ text resembling the Apocryphon of John (Haer. 1. 29). In his Refutation of All Heresies. Hippolytus cites, among other things, the so-called Naassene Hymn (Haer. 5. 10. 2), and Epiphanius has preserved a famous Valentinian text, Ptolemy's Letter to Flora (Pan. 33. 3. 1–7. 10). Although Tertullian has not written a systematic refutation of heresies, in his apologetic and theological texts he nevertheless provides much useful information on Christian movements he considers ‘heretical’. Usually he deals with ‘heretical’ opinions in connection with certain theological themes (flesh of Christ, resurrection of the dead), but he has also composed a special refutation against one ‘gnostic’ movement, the Valentinians. Clement of Alexandria and Origen are important end p.211

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved authors, since they quote original ‘gnostic’ sources which are otherwise unknown. Clement of Alexandria is the only source for a Valentinian teacher, Theodotus. Origen, for his part, cites the Valentinian Heracleon in his Commentary on the Gospel of John. The first ‘gnostic’ original sources surfaced in the second half of the eighteenth century. Codex Askewianus, a Coptic manuscript which contained Pistis Sophia, was purchased by a British collector, Dr Askew, in London in 1773, later transferred to the British Museum, and first published in 1851. Pistis Sophia consists of four books, the fourth being only secondarily attached to the first three. The texts can be dated to the third century. Both Pistis Sophia I–III and Pistis Sophia IV are revelation dialogues in which the risen Saviour converses with his disciples. The topics vary from the destiny of the fallen Sophia, here called Pistis Sophia, and the human souls to the ultimate fate of various sinners. The other eighteenth-century Coptic ‘gnostic’ manuscript was Codex Brucianus, comprising three texts: First and Second Book of Jeu, containing teachings of

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Jesus to his disciples, and a Sethian Untitled Text, presenting a theogony and cosmogony. The following two ‘gnostic’ original sources came to light when another Coptic manuscript, discovered in Egypt, was acquired for the Berlin Museum in 1896. After its initial introduction in the same year, unfortunately it took nearly 60 years before the codex, Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, was published. Hence, the texts of the codex, the ‘gnostic’ Apocryphon of John and Sophia of Jesus Christ, as well as the ‘non-gnostic’ Gospel of Mary and Act of Peter, did not receive the attention they deserved. In fact, even when finally published, the manuscript tended to be eclipsed by a fabulous new manuscript find, the Nag Hammadi library, especially since this discovery also contained both ‘gnostic’ texts found in Papyrus Berolinensis 8502. The year 1945 was a turning point in the study of ‘Gnosticism’. In December of that year, approximately 10 kilometres from the town of Nag Hammadi, some Egyptian fellahs accidentally came upon a jar which contained twelve Coptic codices. Eventually, after many dramatic events involving blood revenge, some papyrus leaves being used as kindling, and smuggling, the codices arrived at the Coptic Museum in Cairo (Robinson 1988: 22–5). Already the first inspections of the texts assured scholars that the number of ‘gnostic’ original sources had increased manifold. In fact, initially many of the scholars who had access to the manuscripts assumed almost uncritically that practically all of the fifty-two texts of the library were ‘gnostic’. It was only after more careful study that it began to become evident that the composition of the library was very diverse, and it was not necessarily the ‘gnostic’ character of the texts—according to any definition of ‘Gnosticism’—which had led them to be part of the same collection. There were also other features in the texts which united many of them, such as an emphasis on asceticism and a fascination with the esoteric and the mystical. Still, it is clear that the Nag Hammadi library contains more ‘gnostic’ original sources than all the other manuscript finds until end p.212

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved now. In the following pages, I shall briefly introduce those Nag Hammadi documents which can be characterized as ‘gnostic’ according to the bipolar definition presented above. In the Nag Hammadi library there are two major sets of ‘gnostic’ literature which are generally recognized, although the exact boundaries of the two sets can be debated. The core of the first set, the Valentinian texts, is usually seen to consist of the following eight works: the Prayer of the Apostle Paul, Gospel of Truth, Treatise on the Resurrection, Tripartite Tractate, Gospel of Philip, First Apocalypse of James, Interpretation of Knowledge, and A Valentinian Exposition. A borderline case, characterized as Valentinian by some scholars, not by others, is the Second Apocalypse of James. Among the Valentinian Nag Hammadi texts, the two which rise above others as far as their general interest and significance is concerned are the Gospel of Truth and the Tripartite Tractate. Despite its name, the Gospel of Truth is not a gospel but rather a homily, in which knowledge is proclaimed as the way to the Father and to eternal rest. Unlike the description of a Valentinian theology by Irenaeus, the Gospel of Truth does not posit a primal dyad but regards the Father as a sole source of the transcendental totality. In this way, the Gospel of Truth is clearly part of that branch of Valentinian theology, represented by the Tripartite Tractate, A Valentinian Exposition, and the Valentinians depicted by Hippolytus, which is characterized by monadic ontology. Another unusual feature of the

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Gospel of Truth is the fact that the text does not make any explicit mention of the fall of Sophia or of the creation by the demiurge. This dearth has caused some scholars to conclude that the Gospel of Truth is not Valentinian at all. Yet the references to ‘the totality searching for the one from whom they had come forth’ (Gos. Truth 17. 5–6; translation by Attridge and MacRae) and to error who ‘became powerful’ and who ‘set about with a creation’ (Gos. Truth 17. 14–15, 18) may be hidden allusions to a Valentinian myth, although the role of error is more negative than that of the Valentinian demiurge in other texts. Since Irenaeus knows about a text called the Gospel of Truth which the Valentinians used (Haer. 3. 11. 9), it has been suggested that the work could date from the middle or even the first part of the second century. This early dating combined with a rather uncomplicated theology and a beautiful style has likewise led some scholars to think that the Gospel of Truth was written by Valentinus himself. This thesis, however, has not been generally accepted. The Tripartite Tractate is a lengthy theological treatise which ‘gives an account of the whole process of devolution from and reintegration into the primordial Godhead’ (Attridge and Pagels 1985: 176). Like the Gospel of Truth, the Tripartite Tractate also represents monadic Valentinian theology. This is illustrated by the fact that Sige (‘silence’), Nous (‘mind’), and Aletheia (‘truth’) are not co-workers of the Father in producing other transcendental aeons, but are qualities which describe the state of his being (Attridge and Pagels 1985: 180). In its account of the end p.213

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved devolution of the divine, the Tripartite Tractate contains a surprising feature. Unlike other Valentinian (or other ‘gnostic’) cosmogonies, the Tripartite Tractate does not attribute the fall to the activity of Sophia but to the Logos. The Logos, whose choice for this task is possibly suggested by the Johannine prologue (Attridge and Pagels 1985: 181), initiates the unfortunate process of creation, but does not act out of ill will but out of love, although his inability prevents him from accomplishing what he wishes. The whole description tries to emphasize that, in the final analysis, even the creation of the world is something which happens according to the divine plan. The Logos repents of his action, and this repentance leads to a process of restoration and salvation not only to Valentinians but to all Christians. The second set of ‘gnostic’ literature which scholars have found in the Nag Hammadi library is the Sethian texts. Some of the ancient heresiologists had indeed referred to a ‘gnostic’ group they styled Sethians, but it was only the Nag Hammadi find which made it possible to speak about a Sethian text corpus. Hans-Martin Schenke (1974, 1981) was the first to realize that certain Nag Hammadi documents, although quite varied, disclose a common set of mythological themes, such as a primordial divine triad consisting of Father (Invisible Spirit), Mother (Barbelo), and Son (Autogenes-Christ); four aeons and illuminators called Armozel, Oroiael, Daveithe, and Eleleth, constituting the final place of rest for Adam, Seth, the seed of Seth (‘gnostics’), and those who repent late; the emergence from Sophia of lower entities, including Yaldabaoth (Sakla, Samael), who become rulers of the material world situated under the divine realm; Yaldabaoth and his companions, who create humans in the image of the divine Adam and imprison them in the material body; and a distinctive periodization of history: the age of Adam, the age of Seth, the age of the original Sethians, and the present time. Since all the above-mentioned characteristics do not all necessarily occur in the same text or exactly in the same form, there have been some differences of opinion as to which Nag Hammadi texts should be included in the Sethian corpus.

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A fairly common view among those who subscribe to the Sethian thesis is that, apart from Thunder: Perfect Mind, all the texts found in the list broached by Layton (see above) should be classified as Sethian. Recently, some suspicions about the homogeneity of the Sethian corpus, have been raised. In his dissertation, Tuomas Rasimus (2006) has suggested that instead of one Sethian corpus, one should talk about a wider ‘classic gnostic’ trajectory which consists of three clusters of material, ‘Ophite’, ‘Barbeloite’, and ‘Sethite’. Rasimus's threebranched ‘Classic Gnosticism’ partly overlaps with Schenke's notion of Sethian Gnosticism, but it also expands the number of available sources (e.g. Eugnostos the Blessed, Sophia of Jesus Christ, and On the Origin of the World are included), and, above all, its point of departure is that the three mythologies underlying ‘Classic Gnosticism’ originally formed independent traditions. Only later were they interconnected when individual authors utilized and linked them in various combinations. Rasimus argues that only in one writing, the Apocryphon of John, are all three traditions brought together, whereas in others end p.214

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved two of them are interfused. Some documents even represent only one particular mythological tradition. In addition to Valentinian and so-called Sethian works, the Nag Hammadi library comprises several ‘gnostic’ texts which defy classification. Among them, one can mention the Apocalypse of Paul, Concept of Our Great Power, Second Treatise of Great Seth, Apocalypse of Peter, Letter of Peter to Philip, and the Testimony of Truth. The Apocalypse of Paul is a description of the apostle's ascent through the heavens. During his journey through the heavens he meets both ascending souls and gatekeepers. Having resisted the attempt of a demiurgical figure to prevent him from proceeding to the seventh heaven, Paul joins with the twelve apostles in the eighth heaven, and they all go up to the tenth, which is the goal of the ascent. The Concept of Our Great Power is a ‘gnostic’ explication of salvation history in apocalyptic form. Time is divided into several periods. The fleshly aeon ends with the Flood, and the Saviour appears during the psychic aeon. The final aeon is unchangeable and characterized by beauty. The Second Treatise of Great Seth contains a revelation discourse delivered by Jesus to the ‘perfect and incorruptible ones’, and the Apocalypse of Peter is an account of a revelation imparted to Peter and explicated by Jesus. Both texts are polemical. The Second Treatise of Great Seth describes the true understanding of Jesus and his teachings over against false Christians who think ‘they are advancing the name of Christ’ (59. 25–6) while persecuting those liberated by Christ. In the Apocalypse of Peter the Christians are seen as split into several factions, who attack and persecute the ‘gnostic-Christian’ group represented by Peter. One interesting detail appears in both texts when they describe the crucifixion. In docetic fashion, Jesus is portrayed as watching and laughing when somebody else is nailed on the cross instead of him. Despite its title, the Letter of Peter to Philip is not a letter but a revelation dialogue between the risen Saviour and his disciples. The basic thrust of the text is to advise Christians how to fight evil powers, and to explain why they have to suffer. The Testimony of Truth is a polemical text. The first part is written to support Christians who are in danger of following the commandments of the Law, placing false hopes in martyrdom and bodily resurrection, and yielding to carnal temptations. The latter part, which is unfortunately badly damaged, strongly criticizes other Christians and their views. It is interesting that the criticism is directed not only against representatives of the nascent ‘orthodoxy’ but also against Valentinians, Basilideans, and Simonians. The latest addition to the ‘gnostic’ text corpus is provided by the famous Codex

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Tchacos which, after many exciting events, was finally acquired for restoration and is now being edited. The Coptic manuscript is comprised of four texts (Kasser et al. 2006: 49–50). Two of them, the First Apocalypse of James and the Letter of Peter to Philip, are versions of texts already known from the Nag Hammadi library. The two others, the Gospel of Judas and the Book of Allogenes, were previously unknown. end p.215

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved For the time being, only the Gospel of Judas has been published. It is a revelation dialogue between Jesus and his disciples. Jesus' most perceptive interlocutor is Judas Iscariot, who not only understands his master best, but who also agrees to fulfil his last request—to hand him over and to free him from the body which fettered him to the earth. The Gospel of Judas seems to derive much of its material from Sethian and/or ‘Barbelognostic’ mythology. It contains a notion of the divine triad (Invisible Spirit, Barbelo, Autogenes) and the four primary luminaries, as well as 360 other luminaries, a reference to the incorruptible race of Seth, and a mention of Yaldabaoth as the creator of humanity (Meyer in Kasser et al. 2006: 137–69).

10.3 Challenges for the Study of ‘Gnosticism’ As the first section of this chapter paradoxically demonstrates, during the last 20 years the definition of ‘Gnosticism’ has become the most difficult issue in the study of ‘Gnosticism’. Future research will have to show whether a new, working definition, which does justice to the sources and which can gain general acceptance, can be reached, or whether the category has become so meaningless and confusing that it has to be rejected altogether, and the texts which used to be called ‘gnostic’ should be classified exclusively under other labels, such as Valentinian, Sethian, Ophite, Christian, or ‘biblical demiurgical’. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, another crucial issue in the study of ‘Gnosticism’ was the question of its origins. There were several competing theories, the most important ones situating the beginnings of ‘Gnosticism’ in Hellenistic, Jewish, Persian, or Christian milieux. The purpose of this search was mainly an attempt to explain the phenomenon itself, to ascertain a kind of ‘gnostic’ identity, with the understanding that if one knows the roots one can determine the content and the further development. Although the quest for the origins of ‘Gnosticism’ has not completely vanished from the research agenda of ‘Gnosticism’ scholars, it has lost its significance and at the same time become more difficult. We have become more and more aware that various cultural phenomena do not generally have clearly definable beginnings; they are always part of a continuum—or actually continua, which meet and cross each other. They do not begin, but they develop, change, give and receive impulses, and form new combinations. Therefore, a new challenge in understanding a phenomenon such as ‘Gnosticism’ is to trace trajectories and to study the innovations which take place in them. Heresiologists refer to numerous ‘gnostic’ groups and thinkers. A good example is Epiphanius, who introduces eighty ‘heresies’ in his Panarion. Among them are end p.216

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order to come up to the round figure presupposed by his Old Testament proof-text. Still, there remains a plethora of different ‘gnostic’ groups he claims to know. The same is true with Irenaeus and Hippolytus. The picture one seems to get based on the extant authentic ‘gnostic’ sources is different. The only names of ‘gnostic’ groups and teachers which are explicitly mentioned by the Nag Hammadi documents are Valentinus, Basilides, Isidore, and Simonians in the polemical statements of the Testimony of Truth. In fact, practically none of the ‘gnostic’ Nag Hammadi texts is connected with any group or teacher. This is even true with those texts which scholars have later identified as Valentinian or Sethian. What is the reason for this discrepancy? Have we really lost all the writings that formed the basis for heresiologists writing their accounts of various ‘gnostic’ groups? Or have they fabricated all their descriptions? Or can some of the extant original sources be connected with some ‘gnostic’ groups or teachers based on a closer analysis of both the original sources and the reports of the heresiologists? Since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, much time and energy has been used for the study of the texts. Nevertheless, most of the effort has still been invested in the editing and translating of the documents. Only a few ‘gnostic’ texts, such as the Gospel of Truth, the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Philip, and the Hypostasis of Archons, have really become the object of thorough and versatile investigations. In order that the Nag Hammadi texts can really make a contribution to our overall understanding of early Christianity, detailed studies of both the text and symbolic world of all Nag Hammadi writings are needed. To combat stereotypical views of ‘Gnosticism’, it is also crucial that the questions of ‘gnostic’ ethics, social history, power politics, and gender be included in the future research agenda of the Nag Hammadi texts. Notes 1.

The term is also used in connection with medieval or even modern phenomena (see Smith 1988; van den Broek and Hanegraaff 1998; Hanegraaff 2006), but since the present study is confined to the period of late antiquity, the later use of the term is beyond the scope of the article. 2. As pointed out by Bentley Layton (1995: 348–9), the term ‘Gnosticism’ was coined by a seventeenth-century English theologian, Henry More. 3. The presentation of Jonas's typological definition of ‘Gnosticism’ is a combination of the characteristic ‘gnostic’ features presented by him in The Gnostic Religion (1963: 34–7, 42–7) and in his article from 1968. 4. The name ‘Self-Designation Approach’ is not invented by Bentley Layton himself but by me (see also Williams 1996: 31–43). I choose to use this rather cumbersome title since it nevertheless indicates in a shorthand fashion that the starting point of Layton's end p.217

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved approach is to trace those texts which contain a reference to the self-designation ‘gnostic’ and which thus provides the basis for creating a ‘gnostic’ data base. Karen King (2003: 14) describes Layton's methodology as ‘a nominalist approach to defining Gnosticism’. 5. Layton's characterization of ‘Gnosticism’ in his 1995 article corresponds to what he called ‘Classic Gnostic Scripture’ in his earlier work The Gnostic Scriptures (1987). In addition to the ‘Classic Gnostic Scripture’, the latter work includes other related texts: the writings of Valentinus, the school of Valentinus, the school of St Thomas, and other early currents. Nevertheless, these texts are not for Layton ‘gnostic’ in the strict technical sense of the word. According to him, ‘Valentinus and his followers’, for example, ‘can best be kept apart as a distinct mutation, or reformed offshoot, of the original Gnostics’ (Layton 1995: 343).

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Suggested Reading Primary sources

Barnstone, W., and Meyer, M. (2003) (eds.), The Gnostic Bible (Boston: Shambhala). Holl, K. (1915–33) (ed.), Epiphanius: Panarion und Anchoratus, 3 vols., GCS 25, 31, 37 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs; vols. ii and iii rev. J. Dummer 1980–5; Berlin: Akademie Verlag). Markovich, M. (1986) (ed.), Hippolytus: Refutatio omnium haeresium, PTS 25 (Berlin: de Gruyter). Roberts, A., and Donaldson, J. (1885–7) (eds.), Ante-Nicene Fathers, rev. A. Cleveland Coxe, 10 vols. (repr. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995).

Robinson, J. M. (1988) (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 3rd rev. edn. (Leiden: E. J. Brill). Rousseau, A., Doutreleau, L., and Mercier, C. (1952–82) (eds.), Irénée de Lyon: Contre les hérésies, 9 vols., SC 100, 152–3, 210–11, 263–4, 293–4 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf). WILLIAMS, F. (1987) (trans.), The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis: Book I (Sects 1–46), NHS 35 (Leiden: E. J. Brill). —— (1994) (trans.), The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis: Books II and III (Sects 47–80, De Fide), NHMS 36 (Leiden: E. J. Brill). See also KASSER et al. (2006); Layton (1987). Secondary literature

DUNDERBERG, I. (2005), ‘The School of Valentinus’, in A. Marjanen and P. Luomanen (eds.), A Companion to Second-Century Christian ‘Heretics’, Suppl. VC 76 (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 64–99. FILORAMO, G. (1990), A History Gnosticism, trans. A. Alcock (Oxford: Blackwell).

KING, K. L. (2006), The Secret Revelation of John (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). LEBOULLUEC, A. (1985), La notion d'hérésie dans la littérature grecque II e –III

e

siècles, 2 vols. (Paris: L'Institut d'études augustiniennes). end p.218

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Marjanen, A. (2005) (ed.), Was There a Gnostic Religion?, Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society, 87 (Helsinki: The Finnish Exegetical Society; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). PAGELS, E. (1979), The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House).

THOMASSEN, E. (2006), The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the ‘Valentinians’, NHMS 60 (Leiden: E. J. Brill). TURNER, J. D. (2001), Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition, Bibliothèque copte de Nag Hammadi, ‘Études’, 6 (Quebec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval; Louvain: Peeters). —— and Majercik, R. (2000) (eds.), Gnosticism and Later Platonism: Themes, Figures, and Texts, Symposium Series, 12 (Atlanta: SBL). WILLIAMS, M. A. (2005a), ‘Sethianism’, in A. Marjanen and P. Luomanen (eds.), A Companion to Second-Century Christian ‘Heretics’, Suppl. VC 76 (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 32–63. See also KING (2003); Markschies (2003); Rudolph (1983); Williams (1996). Bibliography

ATTRIDGE, H. W., and MACRAE, G. W. (1985), ‘NHC I, 3: The Gospel of Truth’, in H. W. Attridge (ed.), Nag Hammadi Codex I (The Jung Codex): Introductions, Texts, Translations, Indices, NHS 22 (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 55–117. ——’and PAGELS, E. (1985), ‘NHC I,5: The Tripartite Tractate’, in H. W. Attridge (ed.), Nag Hammadi Codex I (The Jung Codex): Introductions, Texts, Translations, Indices, NHS 22 (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 159–337. Broek, R. van den, and Hanegraaff, W. J. (1998) (eds.), Gnosis and Hermeticism: From Antiquity to Modern Times (Albany, NY: SUNY Press). HANEGRAAFF, W. J. (2006), ‘Gnosticism’, in K. von Stuckard (ed.), The Brill Dictionary of Religion, ii: E–L (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 790–8. HARNACK, A. (1961), History of Dogma, trans. from 3rd German edn. by Neil Buchanan, 4 vols. (New York: Dover). HENDERSON, J. B. (1998), The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish, and Early Christian Patterns (Albany, NY: SUNY Press). JONAS, H. (1963), The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd edn. rev. (London: Routledge). —— (1967), ‘The Delimitation of the Gnostic Phenomenon—Typological and Historical’, in U. Bianchi (ed.), Le origini dello gnosticismo: Colloquio di Messina,

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13–18 Aprile 1966, Studies in the History of Religions (Supplements to Numen), 12 (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 90–108. Kasser, R., Meyer, M., and Wurst, G. (2006) (eds.), The Gospel of Judas from Codex Tchacos (Washington D.C.: National Geographic). KING, K. L. (2003), What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). —— (2004), ‘Esotericism and Mysticism: Gnosticism’, in S. I. Johnston (ed.), Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 652–6. end p.219

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved KING, K. L. (2005), ‘The Origins of Gnosticism and the Identity of Christianity’, in A. Marjanen (ed.), Was There a Gnostic Religion?, Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society, 87 (Helsinki: The Finnish Exegetical Society; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 103–20. LAYTON, B. (1987), The Gnostic Scriptures, The Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday). —— (1995), ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Ancient Gnosticism’, in L. M. White and O. L. Yarbrough (eds.), The Social World of the First Christians: Essays in Honor of Wayne A. Meeks (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 334–50. MARJANEN, A. (2005), ‘What Is Gnosticism? From the Pastorals to Rudolph’, in A. Marjanen (ed.), Was There a Gnostic Religion?, Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society, 87 (Helsinki: The Finnish Exegetical Society; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 1–53. MARKSCHIES, C. (2003), Gnosis: An Introduction, trans. J. Bowden (Edinburgh: T & T Clark). MEYER, M. (2003), ‘Gnosticism, Gnostics, and the Gnostic Bible’, in W. Barnstone and M. Meyer (eds.), The Gnostic Bible (Boston: Shambhala), 1–19.

PEARSON, B. A. (2005a), ‘Basilides the Gnostic’, in A. Marjanen and P. Luomanen (eds.), A Companion to Second-Century Christian ‘Heretics’, Suppl. VC 76 (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 1–31. —— (2005b), ‘Gnosticism as a Religion’, in A. Marjanen (ed.), Was There a Gnostic Religion?, Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society, 87 (Helsinki: The Finnish Exegetical Society; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 81–101.

RASIMUS, T. (2006), ‘Paradise Reconsidered: A Study of the Ophite Myth and

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Ritual and their Relationship to Sethianism’ (Diss. Université Laval, Quebec; University of Helsinki). ROBINSON, J. M. (1988) (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in J. M. Robinson (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd rev. edn. (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 1–26.

RUDOLPH, K. (1983), Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, trans. R. McLachlan Wilson (San Francisco: Harper & Row). SCHENKE, H.-M. (1974), ‘Das sethianische System nach Nag-HammadiHandschriften’, in P. Nagel (ed.), Studia Coptica (Berlin: Akademie Verlag), 165–74. —— (1981), ‘The Phenomenon and Significance of Gnostic Sethianism’, in B. Layton (ed.), The Rediscovery of Gnosticism: Proceedings of the International Conference on Gnosticism at Yale, New Haven, Connecticut, March 28–31, 1978, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill), ii. 588–616. SMITH, R. (1988), ‘Afterword: The Modern Relevance of Gnosticism’, in J. M. Robinson (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd rev. edn. (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 532–49. WILLIAMS, M. A. (1996), Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press). —— (2005b), ‘Was There a Gnostic Religion? Strategies for a Clearer Analysis’, in A. Marjanen (ed.), Was There a Gnostic Religion?, Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society, 87 (Helsinki: The Finnish Exegetical Society; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 55–79. end p.220

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [221]-[236]

11 Manichaeism Samuel N. C. Lieu Abstract: Origins – Manichaean Scriptures – The Gnosis of Mani – Manichaean Writings and Early Christian Literature – Manichaean Ethics and Hierarchy – The Greek Fathers and Manichaeism – Augustine and Manichaeism – Future Directions in Research Keywords: Christ, Ethics, Father, Fathers, Scripture, Christian, Greek

11.1 Origins O F all the heresies which threatened the unity of the early church, the followers of Mani occupied an exceptional position, as they were devotees not of Jesus but first and foremost of a prophet from Mesopotamia who claimed to be a later-day ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’ and possessor of ‘the seal of the prophet’. Mani, the founder of the sect, was born of Parthian parents (c. 216 CE) in or near Ctesiphon, the winter capital of the Parthian Empire, to which his parents had migrated from Hamadan. While in Ctesiphon, his father Patticius was converted to the teachings of an ascetic baptizing sect, whose followers lived in communities in southern Babylonia. Mani entered such a community as an infant, and later as a young man rebelled against the strict teachings of the sect on self-ablution and the ritual washing of food, especially fruit and vegetables, which was said to be founded upon the teaching of a Jewish-Christian leader Elchasaios. Mani gave a more gnostic interpretation to the rituals, but his views were held to be dangerous by the elders of the sect, who subsequently expelled Mani. His father Patticius and a small number of sectarians followed him, and Mani travelled to Mesene on the Persian Gulf (c. 240 CE), where he sailed for India. It was probably in India that he encountered Buddhist asceticism and monasticism as well as the doctrine of metempsychosis—all of which exercised strong influence on his teaching. On his return to Mesopotamia, he converted the Shah of Mesene to his teaching, and through him Mani was able to have an audience with Shapur I, the second Shahanshah (King of Kings) of the new Sasanian dynasty which had replaced Parthian rule in the Near East. Shapur was sufficiently end p.221

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved impressed by Mani to permit him to disseminate his religion throughout his empire, and as the Sasanians then controlled a considerable part of the Roman Near East, the religion quickly diffused into the Roman Empire. Mani also actively propagated his religion in Iran and Parthia and in adjacent central Asia. He acquired a considerable reputation as a faith-healer and as a book-illustrator. His religion was well established on all the major trade routes between China and the Mediterranean by the time of his death (c. 276 CE). Although he was not

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executed, but died of torture in prison under an unsympathetic Shahanshah Bahram I, his followers regarded his martyrdom as a form of ‘crucifixion’ (Pedersen 2006: 42–85), and in spring each year the sect celebrated the feast of the Bema in which a portrait of Mani was placed on a platform of five steps (Lieu 1992: 35–85; Gardner and Lieu 2004: 3–8, 46–108).

11.2 Manichaean Scriptures Manichaeism was a religion of the book. Mani's main teaching was contained in a canon of seven scriptures. They are: (1) Living Gospel; (2) Treasure of Life; (3) Pragmateia; (4) the Book of Mysteries; (5) the Book of the Giants; (6) the Letters; (7) Psalms and Prayers. These he wrote in an Aramaic dialect akin to Syriac. However, the need to acquaint his patron Shapur I with his teaching led to the compilation or composition in Middle Persian (the official language of the Sasanian court) of a summary of his teaching in which extensive use was made of Zoroastrian religious terminology. In Mar Ammo, Mani had a disciple who was fluent in Syriac and in Parthian, and he inaugurated the systematic translation of Manichaean texts into Parthian. These were later translated into both Middle Persian and Sogdian—the latter being the predominant commercial language of the Silk Road—and from Sogdian into Old Turkish and Chinese. In the Roman Empire, the Syriac writings of Mani were translated into Greek and Coptic, and from them into Latin. Systematic and severe persecution by Roman authorities in the West and Muslim authorities in the East led to the complete disappearance of genuine Manichaean writings until a large number of fragments of Manichaean writings in a distinctive script adapted from Syriac was found by German explorers in Turfan between 1904 and 1914 (Klimkeit 1993: pp. vii–xx). These consisted of texts in Middle Iranian and Old Turkish. More Old Turkish and a number of Chinese Manichaean texts were found in nearby Dunhuang by Aurel Stein and by Chinese scholars. However, the importance of the texts from central Asia for the study of the relationship between Manichaeism and early Christianity was completely overshadowed by the discovery of a sizeable collection of Manichaean texts from Egypt which were much older in date and were found in a predominantly Christian milieu. end p.222

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved The texts were discovered in 1929 by workmen digging for fertilizer among the ruins of Medinet Madi; a small village situated in a large depression in the south-west of the Fayyum to the north-west of modern Gharak (Ptolemaic Kerkeosiris). The chest which contained the texts was found in a cellar, and because of the high humidity of the soil (the entire region was swampy and was subject to flooding by the nearby Lake Moeris), the texts would almost certainly have perished had they not been placed inside a chest. The pages of the papyrus codices, however, acted as a kind of filter for the highly saline flood water, with the result that they were encrusted in salt. The encrustation was particularly dense at the edges of the pages. This, together with the fine quality of the papyrus, made separation into individual pages extremely difficult. The find at Medinet Madi was estimated to have totalled 2,000 leaves, but the cache was broken up by the first dealer: some parts went to Cairo, and some remained in the provinces. A substantial part of the find was purchased by Chester Beatty and is now in Dublin, but the bulk of the find went to Berlin. Reassigning the separated quires to their original codices was far from easy. By 1933 seven codices were identified. In the Berlin collection: (1) Letters of Mani (P 15998); (2) Kephalaia of the Teacher (i.e. Mani) (P 15996) (Gardner 1995); (3) Synaxes codex, which appears to be a commentary (?) on the Living Gospel, a canonical work of Mani (P 15995); (4) the so-called Acta Codex (P 15997), a

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historical work which gave a life of Mani and the early history of the sect; in the Chester Beatty Collection, then in London and now in Dublin: (5) Homilies (Codex D) (Pedersen 2006); (6) Psalm-Book (Codex A) (Allberry 1938); (7) Kephalaia of the Wisdom of my Lord Mani (Codex C). Sadly, some of the codices housed in Berlin were taken by rail to the then Soviet Union after the Second World War, and among those which were not subsequently returned to Berlin (and are presumed lost) were the Letters of Mani and most of the volume containing the Acta Codex (see Gardner and Lieu 2004: 35–40). In 1970 a miniature parchment codex from Egypt containing a semi-autobiographical account in Greek of Mani's early life was successfully deciphered and conserved. Known as the Cologne Mani-Codex—so-called because it is now housed in the Papyrussammlung of the University of Cologne—the text has given a massive boost to the study of the origin of Manichaeism. The Cologne Mani-Codex itself might have once formed the early part of the Acta Codex (P 15997) from Medinet Madi, lost since the end of the Second World War (see Gardner and Lieu 2004: 41–3). It is from the Cologne Mani-Codex that scholars came to know of Mani's involvement with a Jewish-Christian ‘baptist’ sect which Mani claimed to have been founded by a certain ‘Alchasaios’. This has prompted debate among scholars on the exact link between them and the Jewish-Christian Elchasaites, a sect known to us from the writings of heresiologists like Hippolytus and Epiphanius. While we know of the existence of an apocalyptic work known as the Book of Elxai, the actual existence of a heretical Jewish-Christian sect under the leadership of Elchasaios is end p.223

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved less certain. In the Greek Mani-Codex, a leader or the actual founder (arch gos) of the sect is called Alchasaios (sic). Moreover, there is such dissimilarity between the teaching of the Book of Elxai and the ‘Baptists’ of the Mani-Codex that the two might not have been historically related (Luttikhuizen 1985: 210–20, 225–6), or the connection might have been invented to link Manichaeism with an earlier phase of Christian history by his followers. The discovery, however, of the name ‘lxs’ in a biographical text of Mani in a Parthian text (see Sundermann 1981: 19) suggests that the Alchasaios of the Mani-Codex was not just an ordinary leader of the sect, and the fact that the text was in a dialect of Middle Iranian rules out the possibility of Manichaean missionaries active in the more Christianized parts of Mesopotamia Mesopotamia and the Roman Empire ‘inventing’ the ‘Alchasaios’ anecdotes to strengthen the sect's link with Christianity (Merkelbach 1988). A second controversy concerns the date of the Mani-Codex itself. When it was first deciphered in 1970, it was believed that this miniature codex was produced in the fourth century at the height of the Manichaean mission in the Roman Empire. However, two scholars (Fonkic and Poljakov 1990) have suggested that the codex should be dated to the seventh century CE on palaeographical grounds, as the script it uses is unique to Greek texts translated from Syriac. Others have noted that the New Testament citations in the Mani-Codex appear to have been based on late versions and standardized versions of the Greek Bible. A direct translation from Syriac in the seventh century is hard to imagine, because translation is a missionary activity which one would associate with the sect's first entry into the Roman Empire. On the other hand, the late date of the codex and of the translation would explain why a number of accurate details including the Greek versions of the names of some of the tradents of the Codex were found in an early Byzantine anathema text and not in earlier Greek anti-Manichaean polemical writings. The call for re-dating has been little heeded, as the study of

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the subject is subdivided largely along linguistic lines (see below) with too few scholars within each linguistic area to generate an informed debate. The announcement in 1992 of yet another discovery of Manichaean documents from Australian excavations at Kellis in the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt sheds considerable new light on the diffusion of the sect from the Nile Valley. The first major find was made at House 3; but in 1993 a Manichaean psalm inscribed on wooden board was also found in House 4 (A/6), which is a substantial distance from the earlier sites. This strongly indicates that the inhabitants of House 3 were not an isolated group of Manichaeans. The geographical isolation of the oasis was an ideal haven for the sect from its persecutors. The texts so far discovered are unique, in that they were found in an archaeological context and not merely as a hidden cache, and were found together with some private letters of the sect (on this see below). The latter clearly showed that in a corner of the Empire where it was free from religious persecution (pagan or Christian), the sect was able to perceive itself as the true followers of Christ, as presented by Mani (Gardner and Lieu 2004: 43–5, 272–8). end p.224

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11.3 The Gnosis of Mani The teaching of Mani is often seen as the last manifestation of Gnosticism. Many features of Gnosticism, especially of Valentinianism, are certainly encountered in Manichaean teaching. It shares with most gnostic systems the inherent anguish Man(kind) feels being enslaved to time, to the body, and to the physical world. The Manichaean is taught that God is nothing but truth and goodness, and therefore could not have willed suffering and evil in the physical world. Human souls share in the very nature of God; they are particles of the Light coming from the transcendent world. How they have fallen and become entrapped in evil Matter is explained by Mani in a cosmogonic drama which is played out in three acts or moments: Former, Present, and Future. In the Former Moment, Light and Darkness are separate principles. The former is the epitome of all that is good, beautiful, and honourable—its climate is always temperate, and it is insulated from the horrors of war and suffering; its inhabitants are not afflicted with such common ailments as stomach complaints and toothache. It is composed of five elements: Air, Wind, Light, Water, and Fire, and has also five dwellings: Intelligence, Knowledge, Reason, Thought, and Deliberation. The Kingdom of Darkness, which is situated to the south, is ruled by the Prince of Darkness in his infernal kingdom and dominated by concupiscence and strife. He is depicted as a multi-formed monster: his head is like the head of a lion, his rump like the rump of a dragon, his wings like the wings of a bird, his tail like the tail of a great fish, his feet like the feet of crawling animals. In the Middle Moment, forces from the Kingdom of Darkness (usually described as Archons) accidentally entered the Kingdom of Light. They liked what they saw and decided to remain there. As the Kingdom of Light is not equipped for war, not even for its own self-defence, its ruler, the Father of Greatness, has to call forth other deities to fulfil this new role. He evokes from within himself the Mother of Life, who is also called the Great Spirit, and she in turn evokes the Primal Man whom she arms with the five Light Elements of air, wind, light, water, and fire. The Living Spirit and the Mother of Life go down into the realm of darkness. They defeat the Archons of the realm of darkness, out of whose bodies the cosmos is constructed by another deity known as the Demiurge. It is significant that the Demiurge, the shaper of the world, is valued positively in Manichaeism. Ten heavens and eight earths are created by the Demiurge to imprison the evil Archons. But for the cosmos to remain in its correct order, five sons are evoked

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by the Living Spirit: Splenditenens, the great King of Honour, the Light-Adamas, the King of Glory, and Atlas. The first one holds the cosmos, while the last one carries it; so the universal fire comes to pass when, at the end of the world, both of them cease their activities. The Living Spirit attacks the powers of darkness in various different ways. If they have not been used in the making of the world, he pins them to the heavens. By means of the Three Garments of wind, water, and fire, he sweeps the evil water, darkness, and the evil fire (i.e. the three evil ferries) on to the earth. When the corresponding elements of the earth have joined them, end p.225

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved he sweeps them out of the world and into ditches which have been prepared for this purpose. Splenditenens, the first of the five sons, is given oversight of the eighth, ninth, and tenth heavens, while the great King of Honour, who sits in the seventh heaven, oversees the rest of the heavens. The King of Glory is put in charge of the three wheels of wind, water, and fire, but the Living Spirit then takes off the Three Garments of the wind, water, and fire and places them below all things. From there, in the Third or Final Moment (see below), they will rise up above the earths to their place of rest. While the Living Spirit forms the sun and moon out of purified light, the stars—both the planets and the signs of the zodiac—are Archons. The fact that they are hostile to each other is, of itself, an indication of their evil origin. They are fastened to the ‘wheel of the sphere’. A new evocation, the hermaphroditic (Third) Envoy, then seduces the male and female Archons with his/her good looks and induces them to ejaculate and abort the Light-Particles held captive in them. These fall on the earth and bring forth plant and animal life. An elaborate system involving a set of Three Wheels and the main planetary and stellar bodies is then set in motion to return the LightParticles to their original abode. The redeemed Light-Particles are transported via the Column of Glory, whose visible appearance is the Milky Way. When the Three Wheels are set in motion, the Light-Particles or souls are drawn up, refined, and sublimated, and at the same time conveyed along the Milky Way from the moon to the sun. The two stellar bodies are both receiving stations for Light-Particles as well as vessels for their conveyance. The periodic waxing and waning of the moon are therefore caused by the migration of these Light-Particles. From the sun the Light-Particles eventually go to a New Earth which is created by the Great Builder. This New Earth or Paradise ruled by the Primal Man is not the same as the Kingdom of Light, but is made of the same substance. Its main function is to be a home for the deities which have been evoked and the Light which they have redeemed, so that the Kingdom of Light may stay aloof from the turmoil. Smarted by this apparent defeat, the Prince of Darkness creates a pair of male and female demons. The former devours the offspring of the abortions, and thereby ingests their Light-Particles within them and copulates with his partner, who gives birth to the First Man (Adam) and the First Woman (Eve) who are microcosms—exact miniatures of the universe (macrocosm), since both possess a mixture of Light and Matter. Adam is made to forget his distant divine origin by his slavery to Matter. His soul, firmly bound to the accursed body, has literally lost consciousness. It is at this moment that the transcendent Jesus whom the Manichaeans called ‘Jesus the Splendour’ comes to his aid. Jesus, who for the Manichaeans and also for some Gnostic sects plays a cosmic role, here fulfils his more usual function of teacher and exorcizer of demons. He shows him the Father in the heights and his own self which is cast down before the teeth of wild beasts, devoured by dogs, mingled with and end p.226

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved imprisoned in everything that exists, shackled in the corruption of darkness. Jesus also raises Adam and makes him eat of the Tree of Life through which he comes to full realization of the imprisonment of his divine soul by his sinful body. The revelation by Jesus the Splendour to Adam sets the example for all future human redemption. To achieve this liberation, Jesus the Splendour evokes the Light-Mind, and in turn summons forth the Apostle of Light who becomes incarnate in the great religious leaders throughout history and the world. The Light Mind (an important figure in genuine Manichaean literature, but never mentioned in the writings of the sect's Christian opponents) is the first emanation of Jesus the Splendour, and is also the symbol of the Manichaean church. He dwells in the human body, and deals with the propensity of the Old Man—a concept Mani borrowed from St Paul—to sin, as the evil Archons still lie bound within the macrocosm, and their periodic rebellions are reflected on a microcosmic level through sinning, as the human body is constructed from evil Matter. Yet, the human soul is divine, being formed from the unsoiled parts of five sons of the First Man. The five intellectual qualities they represent are bound in the body and overlaid by corresponding evil qualities. This led the soul into error and forgetfulness of its divine origin. When the Light-Mind, whose personification is the Apostle Mani, comes, it liberates the divine qualities, binds the evil ones, and subjugates sin and thereby transforms the believer by divine knowledge (gn sis) into a New Man. Nevertheless, sin can still occur and cloud the intellectual qualities, leading the believer once again into forgetfulness and error. The love and support of church leaders and friends are needed to help to nurture a believer to gradually turn to the true faith. This ‘New Man’—also a Pauline concept—will now display the five virtues of love, faith, perfection, patience, and wisdom (see esp. Gardner 1995: 93–105; Heuser and Klimkeit 1998: 74–6, 123–41). Manichaeism offers a powerful image of how everywhere in the cosmos light and darkness are mixed, and of the channels which shelter light and separate off the darkness. To achieve this separation, the Third Envoy calls up the Column of Glory, up which the parts of light can ascend. First they take their place in the moon, and when the moon wanes, they are transported to the sun and from there on to Paradise. Eventually, in the final of the three episodes, the Final Moment, a new Paradise is constructed for the gods who originated from the Kingdom of Light. When the Light-Particles in the world have been purified out enough for them to come together in the form of the ‘Last Statue’, then the end of the world starts. This will be signalled by the Great War which will come upon human beings unannounced. The Manichaean church will then be severely persecuted, but in the end the church will triumph over every danger and attempt to disperse its believers. The teaching of Mani will win a splendid victory, resulting in the conversion of all humankind. A collective liberation of the Light which has remained in the world until then will accompany this triumph. Jesus the Splendour then appears as the Last Judge and separates good from evil. While the Elect are transformed into angels, the faithful end p.227

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Hearers are labelled as ‘sheep’, while the non-believers will be stigmatized as ‘goats’. Mani taught that the first death, viz. the end of human life, is the abandonment of the soul which is composed of Light-Elements into a mixture with evil Matter. A second death is suffered by those who do not believe; in this death they are refused the return of their souls to the Kingdom of Light and therefore condemned to an eternal mixing with Matter. A Universal Fire of 1,468

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years will take place, and finally the darkness will be compressed into a lump (Gk b los), in which certain sinful souls remain. The two principles will now have returned to their original separate existence. Evil, which is now captured and divided into male and female elements entombed in separate areas in the b los, is now incapable of invading the Kingdom of Light (see Lieu 1992: 7–32; Klimkeit 1993: 8–24; Puech 1951, 1968).

11.4 Manichaean Writings and Early Christian Literature Mani's Jewish-Christian upbringing accounts for his familiarity with Christian writings. His canonical writings owe their titles to the New Testament and the writings of Marcion and of Bardaisan. Even the summary of his teaching which he presented to his patron Shapur I and composed in Middle Persian in the style of Zoroastrian writings contains a lengthy pericope on Matthew 25: 31–46. His pastoral letters are clearly modelled on those of St Paul. The Syriac version of the Diatessaron of Tatian was probably his main source of gospel history, and the work is frequently used by his disciples to equate his ‘martyrdom’ with that of Jesus. Manichaean writings on asceticism drew heavily on the apocryphal Acts of Thomas. On the other hand, Mani's Gospel, which has survived only in fragments, contains clearly polytheistic elements amidst abundant echoes of Christian writings. Besides the Jesus of Splendour, who plays a major soteriological role, the Manichaeans also honour the historical Jesus. In Mani's teaching he is essentially a prophet rather than a redeemer-figure, and his suffering on the cross was purely a feint or similitude. On the other hand, the ‘suffering Jesus’ (Jesus patibilis) in the Manichaean system is a separate deity who personifies the crucifixion of Light-Particles in Matter, and is more highly revered by the sect (Franzmann 2003: 99–118). Mani's debt to Marcion is particularly strong, and in a Manichaean text in Parthian the God who sent Jesus to the cross was referred to as ‘the God of Marcion’. Like Marcion, Mani rejected the teaching of the Old Testament except for the prophetic roles of the patriarchs. His disciple Adda (Latin Adimantus) would later compose a refutation of the Old Testament modelled on the Antitheses of Marcion. end p.228

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11.5 Manichaean Ethics and Hierarchy The long-term imprisonment of Light by Matter in the physical universe, which the Manichaeans see as a form of crucifixion, has important practical consequences for those who have been illumined by Mani's gnosis. Their duty is to be instruments for the liberation of this Light. To do this requires both a conscious effort for virtue by the individual and the avoidance of any action which might harm the Light or prolong its captivity. The Manichaeans are therefore enjoined to observe the ‘Five Commandments’ (fasting, almsgiving, no killing, no flesh-eating, and poverty) and the ‘Three Seals’: i.e. those of ‘mouth, hands and breast’. The Seal of the Mouth forbids an Elect from eating meat and drinking wine, while the Seal of the Breast prevents fornication and marriage, and therefore physical procreation, which prolongs the captivity of Light. The Seal of the Hands is the command to avoid injury to water, fire, trees, and living things, and hence bans the procurement of food. Strict observance of these rules is of course possible only for a select few, and the sect therefore consists of a dyarchy of Elect, who endeavour to keep all the laws, and the Hearers, who are allowed to marry and to procreate and generate wealth as long as they serve the daily needs of the Elect. Mani preached a form of metempsychosis in which a person who violated plant and animal life would be reincarnated in those forms of

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life as an additional warning to avoid killing and harvesting. One can understand why Augustine was sufficiently outraged to create a popular image of the Hearers as enjoying maximum indulgence for their vices provided they kept their Elect well supplied! However, according to the seminal study of BeDuhn (2000: 126–233), Manichaean asceticism for the Elect was motivated not purely by a negative view of the material world or a form of social and hierarchical dominance over the Hearers, but by a positive cosmic plan, as envisaged by Mani, to use the body of the Elect as a means of refining the Light-Particles and the liberation of the Living Self, the sum total of the Light-Elements enslaved in Matter and the cosmos. The Manichaean ritual meal was, according to BeDuhn, an essential part of the religious life of a Manichaean community, or cell. The Manichaeans belonged to a cultic community, and the community was identified in historical sources primarily as revolving round the cultic meal. Conducted daily, the Hearers delivered the food as alms to the place of consumption and the table on which the food is placed is a ritual locale. In BeDuhn's words (2000: 164–5): ‘Manichaeans participated in a templeless and altarless tradition. While other religious communities carried their offerings into temples, where their priests burned them on altars, the Manichaeans bore their alms to the Elect, who cooked them in their own stomachs.’ Though the Manichaean cosmogony is highly complex, and replete with a multitude of deities and demons, the Manichaeans were expert in reducing their main ethical teachings to ‘The Three Seals’, ‘The Five Commandments’ (for the Elect) and ‘The Ten Commandments’ (for the Hearers). Important to our understanding end p.229

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved of the cultic meal as a focus of community ritual is a set of Manichaean texts commonly known as the ‘Sermon of the Light-Mind’ preserved in Coptic, Parthian, Sogdian, Old Turkish, and Chinese. The sermon places the redemptive role of the Light-Mind in both a cosmogonic and an ethical context. It shows how the cosmic process of redemption of Light was temporarily shackled by Greed and Lust congenital to the Old Man. But through adhesion to the commandments of the sect and the intervention of the Light Mind, the Old Man is refashioned into a New Man ruled by the Light-Mind. Combat between the Old and the New Man is frequent and the Light-Particles which are ‘transient guests’ in the body of the Elect would thus suffer periodically, had not the Light-Mind in its redemptive role planted in the body the twelve cardinal virtues. BeDuhn makes the important observation that the Manichaean concept of the Twelve Hours of the Second Light Day represent the Twelve Forms of the Beneficent Light in the Elect, the possession of which became the ultimate moral goal of the Manichaean ritual meal. These Twelve Hours (or Twelve Maidens in some sources) are: (1) Sovereignty; (2) Wisdom; (3) Victory; (4) Persuasion; (5) Chastity; (6) Truth; (7) Faith; (8) Long-suffering; (9) Integrity; (10) Grace; (11) Justice; (12) Light. It is the need for the Elect to put these virtues into practice to assist in the liberation of the Living Self, and not a negative world-view, which lies at the heart of Manichaean asceticism and food taboos. The perfected bodies of the Elect pass through the corresponding stages of cosmic perfection and actively help the liberated Living Self or Soul to establish dominion over the body, not through detachment or self-focused meditation (BeDuhn 2000: 226–33). In this respect the meal is not unlike the Christian eucharist in that in most Christian liturgical expositions the sacred meal is not purely an act of remembrance but also one of contrition, confession, and forgiveness of sins as well as fostering the moral and spiritual uplifting of the participants. Not surprisingly, the sacred meal was widely regarded within the Christian Roman Empire as the Manichaean (and perverted) version of the eucharist.

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In addition to the dyarchy of Elect and Hearers, the Elect themselves are further divided into five grades: (1) the leader (Gk arch gos) who is the successor of Mani; (2) twelve apostles or teachers; (3) seventy-two bishops; (4) 360 elders. After the death of Mani, the first arch gos was Sisinnios, but he soon suffered martyrdom and was succeeded by Innaios. Subsequent arch goi remained in Ctesiphon until the archdiocese was moved to the outskirts of Baghdad in the Islamic period. Later (c. 908 CE) the seat of the arch gos was moved to Chorasan in central Asia as the religion attracted increasing numbers of followers on the Silk Road (BeDuhn 2000: 25–208; Gardner and Lieu 2004: 21–5). Unlike the Manichaean manuscripts produced in the Roman West, which are extremely plain, those produced in central Asia are beautifully illuminated, and they clearly had a major impact on Islamic book production (Gul¡csi 2001, 2005). The high quality of calligraphy is a boon to the reconstruction of often heavily mutilated texts, and has resulted in the leading expert on Manichaean texts, Professor Werner Sundermann, remarking that the Manichaean textus unicus is often the textus optimus. end p.230

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11.6 The Greek Fathers and Manichaeism The oldest surviving Christian anti-Manichaean work is the Acta Archelai attributed to Hegemonius (trans. Vermes 2001: 35–153). Originally composed in Greek, this work has survived in a complete form only in a Latin translation made no later than the beginning of the fourth century. Important parts of the original Greek version of the work have survived in the major anti-heretical work, the Panarion of Epiphanius. In this Mani is depicted as a failed prophet and miracleworker who was imprisoned by the Shahanshah of Persia for failing to cure the Crown Prince from a fatal illness. Mani, however, managed to escape across the border, and tried to convert Marcellus, the leading citizen of Carchar (= Roman Carrhae?) to his new religion. His efforts were thwarted by Archelaus, the Christian bishop of the city, who engaged Mani in a public debate adjudicated by pagan sophists. Crestfallen, Mani returned to Persian-held territory, where he was immediately re-arrested and tortured to death (Coyle 2007: 68–73). This anti-hagiographical version of the life of Mani was widely circulated in the Christian East and formed the basis of the anti-Manichaean writings of Epiphanius and Cyril of Jerusalem. Other Greek fathers, such as Serapion of Thmuis and Titus of Bostra, tried to tackle the philosophical implications of dualism, but their works reveal little detailed knowledge of Manichaean writings. The only Greek father to cite verbatim from a genuine Manichaean work is Severus of Antioch, but his cathedral homily against the Manichaeans (Cathedral Homilies 123) has survived only in two Syriac translations. The usual objection to the Manichaean solution to the problem of evil by supposing that its appearance in human life is due to the mixture of two dissimilar substances is an ethical one. Evil for the Christian Platonist is not a substance but the negation of reality and a failure to grasp the latent possibilities of the good in life. The primary cause of evil in the world is human sin, which is the direct result of free will and can be combated by ascetical living and charity. Such an idealistic view of human suffering probably succeeded only in making Manichaeism more popular (Klein 1991: 16–50; Pedersen 2004: 177–54).

11.7 Augustine and Manichaeism Augustine of Thagaste (354–430 CE, later bishop of Hippo Regius) was undoubtedly the most famous convert to Manichaeism. He encountered the sect

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when he was a student and later a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage, and was a Hearer for nine years (c. 373–382 CE) between the ages of 19 and 28. He was attracted to the sect by its comradeship and hospitality, as well as by its claim to possession of a rational faith. The solution which a dualist faith could offer to the problem concerning the end p.231

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved origins of evil was certainly appealing to a thinking young man dissatisfied with Judaeo-Christian monotheism. Like many Christians who came to Christianity from a predominantly pagan cultural background, Augustine was offended by the crude language and seemingly barbaric stories contained in the Old Testament. The rejection by the Manichaeans of the relevance of Jewish scriptures to their gnostic form of redemption was certainly a blessed relief. Augustine formed a close friendship with Faustus of Milevis, one of the most eloquent and effective Manichaean teachers of his time, and virtually became his literary assistant. He was impressed by the ability of the Manichaeans to underscore the apostleship of Mani by subverting the Christian scriptures through pointing out the numerous inconsistencies and contradictions they contain. It appears that he still had Manichaean friends when he moved to Rome, as he convalesced in the house of a member of the sect after a severe illness (c. 384 CE), and it was with their support that he was appointed rhetor at Milan. Later, thanks to his involvement with the Neoplatonists at Milan and to Ambrose's preaching on the allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament, he gradually moved away intellectually from Manichaeism prior to his famous conversion in 387 CE. While the story of his Manichaean years is famously told in his Confessions (3. 6–5. 13), his intellectual odyssey has to be pieced together from his earlier writings, especially the De moribus Manichaeorum (c. 388 CE) and the De utilitate credendi (391 CE). His most substantial work against the sect—Contra Faustum Manichaeum—was published in 397, shortly before his famous Confessions. The only substantial reply he received to this popular publishing success was a letter from a Manichaean called Secundinus (399 CE), who remembered Augustine from his short stay in Rome. Secundinus strongly urged Augustine to distance himself from a barbaric and non-Roman religion like Catholicism and return to Mani's true gnosis (trans. Vermes in Gardner and Lieu 2004: 136–42). One of the most influential of Augustine's works against Manichaeism is De natura boni published around 399 (and not 404 as traditionally suggested), which is more influenced by Neoplatonic thinking on the problem of evil than his other works. The Manichaean concept of an independent evil principle is refuted by the Neoplatonic argument that evil is a privation of Good and cannot therefore exist without Good. Every nature possesses three basic perfections—limit, form, and order (modus, species, ordo)—and is therefore by nature good. God is the supreme Good, and visible nature, including human nature, is created not out of the substance of God but out of nothing (ex nihilo). Because all things which are created out of nothing participate not only in being but also in non-being, there is an original lack which gives rise to change. Change or mutability can be for better or for worse, hence the possibility of evil. While the supreme godhead, like the Plotinian Monad, radiates goodness, Darkness exists not in its own right but where the radiated light peters out. Because man is created out of nothing, he is vulnerable to suffering by being a sentient creature. This is not due to his natural limitation as a creature, but is a consequence of the sin of Adam, and is experienced end p.232

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© Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved as a punishment. It also deprives mankind of preternatural gifts which had been gratuitously conferred upon him by the creator. Adam's disobedience symbolizes mankind's desertion of the creator for the creature. However, human volition for good or evil is part of God's goodness, and it is a divine mystery why God did not create man without the proclivity to sin. Augustine's response to the Manichaean solution to the problem of evil would become standard throughout the Middle Ages. Revised by Thomas Aquinas, it still remains at the fountainhead of Augustinian and Catholic theology (Moon 1955: 14–41; Evans 1982: 11–40, 12–36).

11.8 Future Directions in Research Few subjects in the study of early Christianity are as heavily dominated by linguists as Manichaeism. Manichaean texts recovered from within the confines of the former Roman Empire and testimonia on the beliefs of the sect preserved by church fathers exist in Coptic, Greek, Latin, and Syriac. Those preserved in the writings of Christian and Islamic writers in Iraq and Iran are in Syriac, Arabic, and New Persian, while those recovered from the Turfan Oasis and from Dunhuang in central Asia are in an even wider range of exotic languages: Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, Old Turkish (Uighur), Tocharian B, Bactrian, and Chinese. As some of these languages were little known prior to the discovery of fragmentary Manichaean texts and codices from Turfan at the beginning of the last century, a great deal of ongoing research is still focused on the decipherment of the languages and the reconstruction and conservation of the fragmentary manuscripts and codices. The scholars best qualified to undertake this work are trained in Oriental or Coptic studies, and their primary interest is often in linguistic problems and in textual reconstruction, with only secondary interest in the teaching and history of the sect. As a result, the discipline may appear to be singularly lacking in major controversies, even though a major international conference has been held every four years since the early 1990s. The difficulty of working with a plethora of often unrelated ancient and medieval languages makes its own scholarly demands and often requires international collaboration at the highest level. Moreover, the compilation of specialist dictionaries of understudied central Asian languages, such as Sogdian and Uighur, as well as rarer dialects of Coptic is a sub-discipline in itself. The successful launch of the UNESCO-sponsored Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum project in 1992 has made the editing and translation of genuine Manichaean texts and of patristic and oriental sources on Manichaeism the primary focus of international scholarly effort for the next half-century. Nine volumes of the Corpus have appeared so far, end p.233

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved including three volumes of the Dictionary of Manichaean Texts. The ongoing need for international funding for the continuation of collaborative research on the texts has tended to encourage scholars to stress agreements rather than disagreements, for pragmatic reasons. A valuable forum of contribution and debate over the last years, especially by scholars based in North America, has been the Society of Biblical Literature's Manichaean Studies Seminar (BeDuhn and Mirecki 2007: vii–viii. A major focus of new research is likely to be the Manichaean material from Kellis in the Darkhleh Oasis in Egypt, which was discovered in situ. The texts, mainly in Coptic and some in Greek and Syriac, were found written on both papyri and wooden boards, and are mainly fourth century in date. Among them are a dozen

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letters of Mani in Coptic which greatly augment our knowledge of the canonical work known as the Epistles (Gardner and Lieu 2004: 166–8; Gardner 2007). Among the texts recovered is a well-preserved hymn to the pantheon of Manichaean deities inscribed on a wooden board which was composed originally in Greek and not translated from Syriac or Coptic. Known by its original title as ‘The Hymn (or Prayer) of the Emanations’, the work underlines the polytheistic elements of Manichaeism, which would certainly have been an attraction to a pagan audience. More significant still is the personal correspondence of the Manichaean community, which is highly informative on a number of aspects of the social and religious life of the sect. These letters employ almost all the standard conventions of Christian epistolography and the use of the nomina sacra (Choat 2006: 26–7, 74–100). A particularly important example is the letter by a certain Makarios to his ‘longed-for’ son Matheos (Gardner et al. 1999: 160), which was written probably in the 350s, or soon after, in which he urges the young man to be diligent in his reading of scriptures both Manichaean and apocryphal Christian: Before everything: I greet you. I remember your gentleness and your calm, and the example of your... propriety; for all this time I have been without you, I have been asking after you and hearing of your good reputation. Also, when I came to you, I found you correct as you have always been. This too is the (right) way. Now, be in worthy matters; just as the Paraclete has said: ‘The disciple of righteousness is found with the fear of his teacher upon him (even) while he is far from him.’ Like guardians (?). Do likewise, my loved one; so that I may be grateful for you and God too may be grateful for you, and you will be glorified by a multitude of people. Do not acquire fault or mockery for your good conduct. Study [your] psalms, whether Greek or Coptic, day (?)... Do not abandon your vow. Here, the Judgement of Peter is with you. [Do the] Apostolos; or else master the Great Prayers and the Greek Psalms. Here too, the Sayings are with you: study them! Here are the Prostrations. Write a little from time to time, more and more. Write a daily example, for I need you to write books here. Do not be like the other one who came to question (?) when he was about to receive instruction about... everything. (trans. Gardner in Gardner and Lieu 2004: 273–4) While almost all the texts listed are well-known Manichaean works, the Judgment of Peter is clearly not Manichaean, as the figure of Peter hardly features in any genuine Manichaean texts. That the Manichaean community in Kellis saw itself as both end p.234

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Manichaean and Christian is startlingly confirmed by these letters. One could see why the orthodox-minded Christian leaders saw the religion both as an external rival and as a major internal threat to the Christian church. Bibliography

ALLBERRY , C. R. C. (1938), A Manichaean Psalm-Book: Part II (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). BEDUHN, J. (2000), The Manichaean Body in Discipline and Ritual (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).

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——’Mirecki, P. (2007) (eds.), Frontiers of Faith: The Christian Encounter with Manichaeism in the Acts of Archelaus, NHMS 61 (Leiden: E. J. Brill).

Bryder, P. (1988) (ed.), Manichaean Studies, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Manichaeism, Lund Studies in African and Asian Religions, 1 (Lund: Plus Ultra). Choat, M. (2006), Belief and Cult in Fourth Century Papyri, Studia Antiqua Australiensia, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols). COYLE, J. K. (2007), ‘A Clash of Portraits: Contrasts between Archelaus and Mani in the Acta Archelai’, in BeDuhn and Mirecki (2007), 67–76. EVANS, G. R. (1982), Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

FONKIC, B. L., and POLJAKOV, B. L. (1990), ‘Paläographische Grundlagen der Datierung des Kölner Mani-Kodex’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 83/1: 22–30.

FRANZMANN, M. (2003), Jesus in the Manichaean Writings (London: T & T Clark).

GARDNER, I. M. F. (1995) (trans.), The Kephalaia of the Teacher (Leiden: E. J. Brill). GARDNER, I. M. F.—— (1996) (ed. and trans.), Kellis Literary Texts I (Oxford: Oxbow Books). GARDNER, I. M. F.—— (2007) (ed. and trans.), Kellis Literary Texts II (Oxford: Oxbow Books). ——’ LIEU, S. N. C. (2004), Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——’et al. (1999) (eds. and trans.), Coptic Documentary Texts from Kellis, i (Oxford: Oxbow Books). GULÁCSI, Z. (2001), Manichaean Art in Berlin Collections, CFM.A1 (Turnhout: Brepols). —— (2005), Medieval Manichaean Book Art, NHMS 57 (Leiden: E. J. Brill).

end p.235

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved HEUSER, M., and KLIMKEIT, H.-J. (1998), Studies in Manichaean Literature and Art,

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trans. M. Franzmann (Leiden: E. J. Brill). KLEIN, W. W. (1991), Die Argumentation in den griechisech-christlichen Antimanichaica, Studies in Oriental Religions, 19 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz).

KLIMKEIT, H.-J. (1993), Gnosis on the Silk Road—Gnostic Texts from Central Asia (San Francisco: HarperCollins). LIEU, S. N. C. (1992), Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China, 2nd edn. (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck). LUTTIKHUIZEN, G. (1985), The Revelation of Elchasai: Investigations into the Evidence of a Mesopotamian Jewish Apocalypse of the Second Century and its Reception by Judaeo-Christian Propagandists, Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum, 8. (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck). MERKELBACH, R. (1988), ‘Die Täufer, bei denen Mani aufwuchs’, in Bryder (1988), 105–33. MOON, A. A. (1955), The De Natura Boni of Saint Augustine—A Translation with an Introduction and Commentary (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press). PEDERSEN, N. A. (2004), Demonstrative Proof in Defence of God—A Study of Titus of Bostra's Contra Manichaeos: The Work's Sources, Aims and Relation to its Contemporary Theology, NHMS 56 (Leiden: E. J. Brill). —— (2006), Manichaean Homilies, CFM Series Coptica (Turnhout: Brespols).

PUECH, C.-H. (1951), ‘The Prince of Darkness and his Kingdom’, in Satan (London and New York: Sheed & Ward), 127–57; originally in French, ‘Le Prince des Ténèbres en son royaume’, in Satan, ed. B. de Jesus-Marie (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1948), 136–74. —— (1968), ‘The Concept of Redemption in Manichaeism’, in J. Campbell (ed.), The Mystic Vision: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, 6; Bollingen, 30, 6 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 247–314. SUNDERMANN, W. (1981), Mitteliranische manichäische Texte kirchengeschichtlichen Inhalts, Berliner Turfantexte, XI (Berlin: Akademie Verlag). VERMES, M. (2001) (trans.), [Hegemonius], Acta Archelai (The Acts of Archelaus), Manichaean Studies, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols). end p.236

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [237]-[257]

12 Arius and Arians J. Rebecca Lyman Abstract: Introduction – The Quest for the Historical Arius – Theologies and Alliances after Nicaea – Christianity and Tribal Peoples – Directions for Further Study Keywords: Christ, Christianity, Christian

12.1 Introduction A LTHOUGH the teachings of Arius of Alexandria sparked a series of theological debates and church councils in the fourth century concerning the nature and redemptive activity of God, scholars share a slim consensus as to the origins and content of his teaching. For the first time in 325 the adjudication of Christian controversy took the form of a council including the Roman emperor Constantine at the lake-side town of Nicaea close to the imperial capital of Nicomedia. In the decades that followed, the statements of the Nicene Council slowly took on venerable, if not sacred, weight, especially as defined by the often embattled bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius. Many of those who opposed the theology of Nicaea or Athanasius were polemically grouped together and labelled as ‘Arians’ in spite of significant theological differences from Arius or each other, and indeed doctrinal differences existed among those who accepted Nicaea. Although the statement of the Council of Constantinople in 381 reflected conceptual shifts developed over the course of the century, the council and Emperor Theodosius evoked Nicaea as a theological precedent which established its authority as a definitive rule of orthodox identity. The theological conflicts of the fourth century thus achieved unprecedented authority within Christianity because of the crucial function of ‘conciliar’ creeds to define and cement multiple geographical centres and theological traditions into a unified Christian identity. As discussed by Maurice Wiles (1996), Arius, as the theologian condemned at Nicaea, became the archetypal heretic; ‘Arianism’ thus became the archetypal heresy, which denied the saving divinity of Christ, and therefore essential end p.237

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Christian identity. By its rejection of Arius and Arianism, the orthodox tradition past and present has defined its own belief and practice. Historically, this polarized theological tradition has made the origins and significance of Arius and the later opponents of Nicaea difficult to reconstruct. First, we have only three letters and fragments from a theological poem, the Thalia, from Arius himself, so much of the information about his theology exists through the mediation of hostile sources. Such heresiological sources are notoriously difficult to interpret. By the fourth century ancient controversialists followed a polemical form which emphasized sectarian, disobedient, and demonic

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behaviour. Opponents were excluded from Christian tradition by labelling in accordance with previous heresies and association with external beliefs such as Judaism or Hellenism. Any retrieval of theological argument must therefore be filtered through these forms of speech as well as compared to other contemporary documents. Second, scholars have begun to unravel the assumed theological ties between Arius and those later called ‘Arians’. They now reject a coherent movement called ‘Arianism’, but rather study the variety of doctrines and alliances of those opposed to Nicaea, i.e. ‘non-Nicenes’. Third, if Christian religious identity is defined according to spiritual and theological principles of Nicene orthodoxy, it may be difficult to retrieve or comprehend alternatives as vital forms of Christian belief and practice. The broadening of the study of ‘Arianism’ to examine questions of asceticism, spirituality, and liturgy, as well as soteriology and cosmology, reflects these historiographical concerns. Finally, the controversy spans a period of significant change in Christian institutional structures, public roles, and theological authority. These shifts, with their opportunities and anxieties, are woven into the texture of the debates, so that a strictly theological account is inevitably an impoverished one. This essay will review recent studies of Arius and non-Nicenes from the outbreak of the controversy to the conversions of the tribal peoples in the western empire.

12.2 The Quest for the Historical Arius In an interesting echo of the methodological scepticism eventually voiced by scholars in the nineteenth century seeking the historical Jesus, the recent focus on recovering the historical Arius in the last 25 years has accorded similar charges of distorting interpretive lenses: Arius as recently reconstructed is too ‘modern’ or too ‘Barthian’ (Vaggione 1989: 77; Löhr 2005, 2006). These evaluations, besides continuing the ancient practice of labelling opposing opinions, reflect the paucity of historical evidence, the continuing strength of the traditional paradigm, and the freshness of the scholarly revisions. To date, most reconstructions of Arius have not end p.238

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved been able to make conclusive sense of the origins of the controversy, though they have begun to illuminate various possibilities of re-charting the conflict. Ironically, the increasing separation of Arius from later ‘Arianism’ has worked to make him less important in the reinterpretation of the history of the subsequent theological struggles. He is currently viewed more as a catalyst for conflict than as the founder of a movement. Given the intellectual liveliness and seminal apostolic traditions of the Christian communities in the large cities along the eastern rim of the Mediterranean, it is not surprising that a major theological controversy should originate there, especially in Alexandria, known for its ethnic and civic divisions as well as its intellectual energy. Arius was the presbyter of a community in a suburb in Alexandria, Baucalis, and originally from Libya. In this location his church would have included local herders; it may have been close to the tomb of St Mark and other martyrs, and perhaps a gathering place for early ascetics. Given his later popularity among ascetics-a number of virgins shared his excommunication-and comments on his drawn appearance, Arius may well have been an early ascetic (Haas 1997: 272). From his extant writings he appears to have been well educated in traditional theology and philosophy. From his appeal to Eusebius of Nicomedia as a ‘co-Lucianist’, he probably studied with Lucian of Antioch, a famous teacher and martyr, although he does not appear on any list of students (Parvis 2006: 40 f.). He was ordained after the persecution of Diocletian, possibly around 311. Different policies concerning the treatment of the lapsed had divided

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the Alexandrian church and clergy, as they had done in North Africa and other parts of the Empire. Although Arius was accused of being a member of the schismatic Meletian party, recent scholarship discounts this (Hanson 1988: 5). According to the extant literary sources, the initial conflict began as a theological disagreement on the relation of the Father and the Son between Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, and Arius. The exact chronology remains disputed, but it is generally thought to have begun in the period from 318 to 323 (Parvis 2006: 68–73). According to the later church historian Socrates, and implied in a letter of Constantine, Alexander initiated a discussion of scripture among the clergy, and Arius's reply was unacceptable (Hist. eccl. 1. 5, 7). Arius complained in a letter to Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, that he had been unjustly persecuted since he had disagreed with Alexander's teaching. He characterized the bishop's views as portraying the Father and Son as eternally coexistent and the Son as without beginning. This, he claimed, would make a number of eastern bishops anathema since they all teach that God has an existence without beginning prior to the Son. Arius insisted that the Son was not ‘unbegotten’ (agenn tos) nor a part of unbegotten being, but by will and counsel before time came into being ‘only-begotten’ and unchangeable. Before he was begotten, the Son did not exist. Therefore they are being persecuted because they teach that the Son has a beginning (arch ), but God does not; he is made from nothing (ek ouk ont n) rather than a part of God or pre-existing material. end p.239

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Arius appealed to the bishop as a ‘co-Lucianist’ to remember his suffering (Urk. 1 = Epiphanius, Pan. 69. 6; Theodoret, Hist. eccl. 1. 4).1 A second letter from Arius and others sets out their faith seemingly in response to Alexander's objections. They claim that they have learned this theology from their forefathers and from him. They affirm one God as the only unbegotten, and his begetting of his only begotten Son by his will, unchangeable, a perfect creature, but not as other creatures. They then list unacceptable alternatives to understand the beginning of the Son: neither an emanation as Valentinus, nor a consubstantial (homoousios) part as Mani, nor a divided torch as Sabellius. Rather, he is a Son created by the will of the Father, and subsists with him, receiving from him his life, glory, and being without depriving the Father. Three hypostases exist: God alone is the cause of everything and without beginning, the Son begotten alone by the Father before time, though not co-eternal or co-uncreated with the Father, and God is one (monas) and first principle. God cannot be composite, divisible, or mutable, so generation should not be understood as corporeal. In this letter the claim that the Son came from non-existence was no longer included, and an emphasis on the Son as unchangeable even as a creature was affirmed (Urk. 6 = Epiphanius, Pan. 69. 7). These two letters may then be compared to fragments of the theological poem, the Thalia, which Athanasius claimed that Arius wrote for propaganda, and which he preserves in two polemical works. The poetic form does appear to invite broad participation in theological discussion, but the reconstruction of its content and structure as retrieved solely from an admittedly hostile source remains contested (Stead 1978; R. Williams 2001: 256). Arius began by affirming his own spiritual and intellectual lineage from the wise. The theology then expressed was profoundly apophatic in affirming God's unbegotten essence as ineffable, so that worship and knowledge of him came only through ‘the one in nature begotten’, the ‘one who has a beginning’, the ‘one born in time’. The Son is ‘appointed’ and ‘born’, but has nothing proper to God in his essence, being neither equal to nor consubstantial with him. The Son cannot see God, but sees only the invisible through the power given to him. The Son thus existed by the paternal will as

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only begotten God, and becomes ‘wisdom’ by the will of God who retains the original faculty of wisdom in himself. So, the Son is conceived by means of many concepts (epinoia) including spirit, power, wisdom, glory, truth, and light. He praises the supreme God, but he cannot by comprehension know the ingenerate one who begot him. These fragments seem to be a theological hymn on the transcendence of God as creator and the unique revelatory agency of the subordinate Son. Two letters from Alexander set out his response to this theology, although the authorship and chronology of both are disputed (Parvis 2006: 69–72). In Henos S matos Alexander defended his disciplining of Arius and criticized the support of Eusebius of Nicomedia in a letter addressed to fellow ministers (Urk. 4b = Socrates, Hist. eccl. 1. 6). He listed twelve clergy and two bishops who were teaching contrary to scripture. He summarized their teaching as rejecting the eternity of end p.240

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved God's fatherhood: God as being itself created the Son out of nothing, so the Son does not share God's nature, nor is the Son the essential Word or Wisdom of God. He is one of the things created. Therefore, he was mutable by nature, and does not fully know or see the Father. In an echo of Origen's debate about the nature of the devil, Alexander claims that they also agree that theoretically the Word can change, since it is begotten. Given its vocabulary and theological emphasis, the letter may in fact have been written by Athanasius (Stead 1988). The other letter attributed to Alexander, H Philarchos (Urk. 14 = Theodoret, Hist. eccl. 1. 3), is a longer account of conspiracy, madness, and association with Jews and Greeks. There certainly appears to be a broader social problem of separate meetings, involvement of women ascetics, lawsuits, and persuasion of other clergy to their theological opinion. Theologically, the focus of the letter's description was on their absurd doctrine of the created Son. Alexander's opponents claim that there was a time when the Son was not. God created all things from non-existence, so the Son is of a mutable nature. Therefore, humans can become sons of God just like he did; for God knew through foresight that the Son would not break faith, and singled him out for his discipline (ask sis). They therefore ignore the scriptural passages on the immutability of Wisdom and focus on the passages of the Saviour's obedience (Ps 14: 7). Alexander refuted, first, creation from nothing as inappropriate to the eternal Word of God. The Son as God's essential Wisdom and Image was always with God. He has therefore an immutable nature, and is a Son by nature not capable of progress or change. Thus, he could reveal the Father to Philip (Jn 14: 8–9). The author denies that this implies two unbegottens; even if the generation is mysterious and beyond comprehension, the Son is the immutable and precise image of the Father. In the initial years of the conflict, the church of Alexandria became deeply divided. Both sides of the argument described their opponents in polemical terms as unfaithful, unjust, and doctrinally heretical. The confrontation seems to have involved literary exchanges as well as physical demonstrations, involving other clergy, laity, and ascetics. Rowan Williams has suggested that the fierce tone of the controversy represents a conflict between public episcopal Christianity and private academic Christianity within the ‘spectacularly fissiparous’ world of Alexandrian Christianity with its independent presbyters and Gnostic traditions. Arius therefore represented the older ‘school’ form of speculative Christianity which was now in conflict with the public, sacramental, and communal authority of Alexander emerging in the early fourth century. The allies of Arius, such as Eusebius of Caesarea, were therefore part of the ‘school’ tradition which elsewhere had given way to the authority of the monarchical bishop (2001:

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46–85). Several factors should caution us about this explanation of the initial Alexandrian crisis. First, Alexandria was a divided church in the early fourth century due to persecution and theological disputes, but the fault lines probably do not break so clearly between public episcopal and private teaching authorities. Epiphanius end p.241

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved remains a foundational text for seeing Alexandrian presbyters as rival teachers, but this is clearly a heresiological explanation for the creation of sects: Arius creates Arians and Colluthus creates Colluthians (Haas 1997: 270; Brakke 1995: 64; Davis 2004: 52). In fact, Alexandria may have had more unity at this period between teaching and episcopal offices. In the third century Demetrius had created ties between the bishop and a school for the catechesis of converts by appointing Origen as its teacher; this unity continued, as seen in the many bishops emerging from the school over the course of the third century, and portraying themselves as theological authorities (Davis 2004: 27). Bishops in Alexandria were elected from presbyters rooted in the divisions of the city, and this custom seemed to persist in Alexandria until Peter and Alexander in the early fourth century began a tradition of appointing their successors (Kemp 1955). This departure from the earlier pattern might be significant, but for all Alexandrian presbyters, not merely ‘teachers’. Philostorgius and Theodoret suggest that Arius was a possible competitor to Alexander for the episcopacy, although episcopal rivals are as heresiologically stereotypical as ‘bishops and teachers’ (Parvis 2006: 73). Second, as recently argued by Claudia Rapp, Weber's opposition of charismatic and institutional authority which underlies this analysis does not entirely fit the ancient Christian communities, in which all leaders were bearers of the Spirit (2005: 17). Unlike Origen, a teacher at the time of his conflict with Demetrius, Arius was a presbyter in charge of a local congregation. Throughout the controversy the majority of participants were all clergy, indeed were bishops, but controversialists regularly labelled their opponents as ‘intellectuals’ or outsiders, as part of the rhetorical construction of a heresy. Unfortunately, these labels continue to stick. Williams underlines Arius's claim to be theodidaktos (‘Godtaught’) as an indication of a primary teaching identity, when in fact it was a commonplace from 1 Thessalonians 4: 9 defending sacred rather than secular teaching and also used by Alexander in H Philarchos 35 (R. Williams 2001: 85–7). The fact that this acrimonious debate spread rapidly beyond Alexandria to include other clerics, as well as ascetics and laity at home, suggests that the issues involved struck religious chords much broader than those of an esoteric teacher. Returning to the possible doctrinal issues, scholars have struggled to understand the significance of the theological positions outlined in the brief letters of Arius and Alexander. Both men are on new ground theologically, but why they occupy this space remains puzzling. The problem of the causality of the Son was inextricable from Christian claims to be monotheists who also affirmed the divinity of the Son. Following scriptural images which described Christ as the Son, Wisdom, Word, image, or glory, and philosophical models of a mediating cosmic agent, earlier theologians could portray a pre-existent being who necessarily shared divinity with the Father, yet was subordinate in his creating or saving actions. As the Word or Wisdom of God, the Son could be described as eternally pre-existent with the Father. In Alexandria, Origen had defended a model of eternal generation of the end p.242

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Son as a separate, pre-existent hypostasis along the lines of a Wisdom theology; this refuted both an improper blurring of the Father and Son (modalism), who were evidently distinguished as separate persons in scripture by such verses as Mark 10: 18, and the promotion of a human being (adoptionism), which was obviously against the testimony to the Son's divinity such as the prologue to the Gospel of John. Scripture conveyed a range of meanings concerning the relation of the Father and the Son which theologians struggled to reconcile. In the fourth century this Logos model of a subordinate or secondary divinity, however traditional or even biblical, was increasingly seen as inadequate to express divine unity. Equally important, theologians struggled to find categories which conveyed the obedience and suffering of the incarnate Son recorded in ancient Christian writings. Origen described the union of a pre-existent human soul with the Word; the incarnate Word could then be seen through divine and human natures as both obedient image of humanity and the divine revelation of the Father. For Origen, titles such as ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ were used to describe the human life of the incarnate Word, and exegetes needed to understand the multiple titles of scripture. In Alexandria, Alexander and Arius shared an important modification of Origen's theology: neither made room for a human soul in the model of the Incarnation, and both applied all scripture to the one subject of the Logos. This could create problems of docetism, in which the divine Word did not seem to share truly in human experience, or adoptionism, in which the human experiences of the Word seemed to indicate his necessary separation from the Father. Thus, in the ensuing debates, Alexander complained that Arius applied passages of ‘humiliation’ and ‘weakness’ inappropriately to the divine Son, and later non-Nicenes complained that a Son who was of the same divine nature could not be the authentic subject of suffering and obedience. The problem of scriptural titles and actions is clearly an issue. Is the Son the very Wisdom or Word of God, or does he receive this title as a gift from the Father? Causality, exegesis, and soteriology were intertwined. The modern investigation of Arius began by questioning his traditional reputation as merely a speculative philosopher and granting some respect to his theological questions about the generation of the Son, including the ambiguity of scripture and earlier tradition on such matters (Wiles 1962). In 1981 Robert Gregg and Dennis Groh directly challenged the traditional interpretation of Arius by asserting that the centre of his thought was indeed a process of salvation; this reversed the commonplace which portrayed Athanasius as defending soteriology through divinization (God became man, so that man could become divine), in contrast to Arius's arcane focus on cosmological causality. According to Gregg and Groh, the essential distinction of the Son's nature from the Father's enabled the created Son to be a true moral exemplar for the life of the believer. As brought into being, he was changeable, though he remained unchangeable by will. The portrayal of the Son was therefore based on Luke—Acts and Hebrews as a model of faithfulness and end p.243

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved spiritual progress. They placed this into the contemporary situation of asceticism as well as the traditional high demands of Christian ethics. This presentation provoked a number of criticisms. Although they used material from Asterius as well as Arius to portray ‘early Arianism’, critics noted the diversity, if not disagreement, of opinions in the texts, so questioning the

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existence of a coherent movement. Equally important, the centrality of the soteriology of the advancing Son rested heavily on the reports by hostile sources: namely, the letters of Alexander and later passages in Athanasius. If this were a main theme, it should have been more evident in the Thalia or explicitly condemned by later ‘conciliar’ decrees (R. Williams 2001: 258; Stead 1994: 26). However, their attention to Athanasius's polemics in asceticism and the social context of Arius pushed the evaluation of the controversy out of purely cosmological models and sparked a re-examination. Other scholars also pursued links between the generation of the Son and the meaning of the Incarnation. Rudolf Lorenz portrayed Arius as indebted to the thought of Origen concerning the human soul of Christ. Lorenz argued that by modifying Origen's claim of eternal generation of the Logos, Arius reframed Origen's process of incarnation. The created Logos now functioned as the obedient human soul and the site of foreseen virtue and exemplary behaviour (Lorenz 1979, 1983). Scholars were again reluctant to see a positive use of ‘adoptionism’ by a theologian and felt that Arianism was being explained through polemical charges rather than on its own terms (Stead 1994: 36). Richard Hanson also emphasized incarnation as central to Arius's concern. He argued that the distinction of the Son from the Father allowed the incarnate Son to be the subject of suffering, a concern evident in later fourth-century arguments of non-Nicenes. He remained more sympathetic to the arguments of Gregg and Groh and Lorenz, but was criticized for the breadth of his category of ‘Arian’ (Hanson 1988). Simonetti made a connection between the emphasis on divine will, exact image, and non-existence in Lucian of Antioch; but the paucity of Lucian's extant works, as well as those of Arius, can easily make this a circular argument (Simonetti 1975). Scholars have also tried to link Arius to larger cosmological shifts at this time. Rowan Williams located the origins of Arius's concern in the shifting Platonic models of the fourth century. Not only did Arius deny eternal generation; he also denied the knowledge of the Father by the Son as well as any participation in essence. Williams argued that this shift reflected changes in contemporary Platonism: namely, the increased transcendence of Plotinian thought and the rejection of analogy. Arius was therefore a philosophical radical, if a theological conservative. His focus on the Son as mediator and worshipper of the Father might also be linked to Alexandrian traditions concerning worship and the angel liturgy (R. Williams 2001). Although this is a highly suggestive account, the verbal parallels with Plotinian philosophy are contested (Stead 1997). The portrayal of Arius as fundamentally philosophical also seems to hark back to polemical stereotypes (Vaggione 1989: 75; Wiles 1996: 178). Finally, Arius's rejection of coexistent principles end p.244

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved could also be linked to the growing presence in Egypt of Manichees, who were identified as Christians and taught two eternal principles of Good and Evil. The appearance of two coexistent principles in a concept of eternal generation could be a sensitive charge given the local strength of the Manichees (Lyman 1989; Heil 2002). Because of the ancient Christian love of letter writing and networking, especially during controversy, the dispute rapidly involved a number of prominent eastern bishops. For the most part the supporters of Arius seem to have been drawn together by the theology of Lucian of Antioch and geography, including Libya and Palestine (Parvis 2006: 39–50). Eusebius of Nicomedia, whose see was the eastern imperial capital and who was linked to the family of Constantine, was appealed to by Arius as a ‘co-Lucianist’. He received Arius after his

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excommunication in Alexandria, wrote letters in his defence (Urk. 8 Theodoret, Hist. eccl.1. 5), and was one of the leading opponents of Nicaea, as well as sponsoring missions to India and to the Goths. His few extant letters emphasize the singularity of divine essence as unoriginated and the creation of the Son as a complete likeness by will (Hanson 1988: 28–30). Asterius was also a pupil of Lucian, and wrote a Syntagmation in defence of Arius. He emphasized the Son's separate hypostasis, especially for incarnation, as well as the generation of the Son by the will of the Father as ‘exact image’ (Kinzig 1990; Vinzent 1993). Eusebius of Caesarea defended the transcendence of the Father and the creation of the Son as the image of the true God. Early in the controversy he wrote to Alexander wondering how anyone could suppose that the Father as first cause could share his nature with a product (Urk. 7). After being condemned at the Council of Antioch in 324, Eusebius accepted the creed of Nicaea. However, he interpreted it to his congregation in such a way as to continue to emphasize the Socrates, Hist. eccl. 1. 8). power of the Father as the cause of the Son (Urk. 22 Other early supporters included Paulinus of Tyre and Athanasius of Anazarbus. Though Arius was condemned at local synods in Egypt and Antioch, and defended at synods in Bithynia and Caesarea, the Council of Nicaea was eventually organized by Constantine to sort out the problem. In his letter to the disputants in 324, Constantine rebuked them for public quarrelling like philosophers about obscure theological points, and encouraged them to make peace for the sake of the Church (Urk.17 Eusebius, Vit. Const. 2. 64). The Council may have been originally organized by Alexander and his supporters to meet at Ancyra, but was changed by Constantine to a place nearer his capital of Nicomedia. The bishop of Ancyra, Marcellus, was a controversial ally of Alexander and Athanasius. Following a tradition of theology from Asia Minor, he affirmed that God was a monad, and ‘Son’ only a temporary title for divine action in incarnation; no distinction existed in God eternally (Lienhard 1999; Parvis 2006). If Arius was present at Nicaea, he was a minor figure as a presbyter, as was Athanasius as a deacon, since the bishops were the official representatives and voting members. We have no official account end p.245

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved of the council and several conflicting accounts. The term homoousios seems to have been included, perhaps at the suggestion of Constantine, because it was rejected by Eusebius of Nicomedia and others (Drake 2000: 250–8). Two bishops from Libya refused to sign and were exiled, as was Arius. Although Eusebius of Nicomedia signed the creed, he was exiled shortly after because he gave hospitality to followers of Arius from Alexandria. After Nicaea we have only limited evidence about Arius's activities. Evidence suggests that Arius was recalled from exile around 327/8 through a small council at Nicaea. He had written to the emperor asking to put arguments aside and be returned (Urk. 30 Socrates, Hist. eccl. 1. 26). Constantine wrote to Alexander asking him to reinstate Arius in Alexandria, but Alexander died shortly thereafter, and his successor, Athanasius, refused to accept Arius (Urk. 32). Over the next years Arius seems to have been in Egypt or Libya. Around 333 Constantine replied to yet another letter from Arius asking for help in being reinstated, as well as discussing issues of incarnation. Wishing to maintain peace, the emperor criticized his separatism, his theology, and his ascetic appearance; an edict was issued which compared him to Porphyry, and ordered his works to be burned (Urk. 34; Urk. 33 = Socrates, Hist. eccl.1. 9). However, Constantine later invited him to answer his charges, and Arius successfully did so at a synod in Jerusalem in 335. However, when he returned to Alexandria, rioting occurred, and the emperor summoned him to Constantinople. At another synod in 336 Arius

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accepted the Nicene statement of faith, and the bishop of Constantinople was ordered to admit him to communion. According to Athanasius' sensational account, on the eve of this event, Arius died suddenly in a public lavatory. Eusebius of Nicomedia saw to his burial (Hanson 1988: 264–5).

12.3 Theologies and Alliances after Nicaea The immediate result of the Nicene Council was not the stabilizing consensus hoped for by Constantine, but the hardening of certain theological alliances and the creation of others. Recent scholarship has argued that the focus after the council was not Arius, but rather the theology of Marcellus of Ancyra, who was a supporter of Nicaea, but was suspected of modalism, and therefore offered a target for those who opposed Nicaea (Lienhard 1999; Parvis 2006). The excluding term homoousios remained unpopular due to its novelty and past use by Gnostics together with the anathemas which condemned the use of ‘three hypostases’. Lienhard (1987) suggested that one could chart the shifting theological alliances by attention to end p.246

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved categories of one hypostasis (Marcellus) or two (Eusebius of Caesarea). More recently, Ayres has argued for a configuration of Homoiousians, Heterousians, etc., but also emphasizing the diversity of opinion and networking as alliances rather than coherent theological parties (2004: 13). As Vaggione suggested, the battles became increasingly heated and technical, not because of profound differences, but rather because in fact so much was shared in common and progress occurred only incrementally (2000: 104). Institutionally, the often confusing series of imperial councils and creeds together with the continually shifting political alliances was a new phenomenon in Christianity. Some groupings remained alliances, whereas others developed into separate churches (Löhr 1986). For the most part Arius became irrelevant to later controversy except as a heretical category to be attached to opponents of Nicaea (Wiles 1993). Those who had supported him initially, including Eusebius of Nicomedia and Eusebius of Caesarea, did not wholly share his views; those non-Nicenes who later saw themselves as followers of Lucian of Antioch criticized Arius for his lack of theological acuity on certain points (Ferguson 2005). In his Orations Against the Arians (c.339/40), Athanasius in exile in Rome, perhaps in the company of Marcellus of Ancyra, created ‘Arian’ as the heretical label to apply to any one who opposed him as bishop of Alexandria or the doctrine of Nicaea (Parvis 2006: 180–1). Using conventional heresiological tactics, a ‘school’ was created based on a ‘teacher’, Arius, and diverse sets of opinions could be melded into a coherent sect relentlessly opposed to the apostolic truth of the Church. If one held similar opinions, one was thus part of this movement and an ‘Arian’, not a ‘Christian’. Athanasius also associated Arian theology with ideas outside Christianity such as those of Jews, philosophers, or Manichees (Burrus 1991; Lyman 1993a; Gwynn 2007). He created a demonic succession to explain Arius's teaching, and showed how his thought echoed other condemned thinkers such as Paul of Samosata. However, as doctrinal questions and political alliances shifted, so did his categories. By 359 he reserved the term ‘Arian’ for only the most extreme non-Nicenes, the ‘Neo-Arians’, and upholders of the Homoian creed (T. D. Barnes 1993: 135). If we discard the label ‘Arian’ as a collective for those who opposed Nicaea or Athanasius, we are returned to the complex theological negotiations of varied authors. In the East, the polemical title of ‘Arian’ did not even figure in all

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controversies or was used as a theoretical boundary in contradistinction to modalism (Lyman 1993a; M. Barnes 1998). As mentioned above, the powerful alliance of churchmen who were the earliest supporters of Arius seemed to share a theological legacy from Lucian of Antioch, a martyr and teacher (d. 312). Lucian had taught the singleness of God as creator, the power of divine will, and the full revelation of God through the Son, his perfect and unchanging image; God consisted of three hypostases in one will. A council at Antioch in 341, ‘the Dedication Council’, echoed this theology. The Son was the ‘exact image’ of the Father (Brennecke 1993). This insistence on separate hypostases and the priority of the Father was supported by end p.247

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Eusebius of Caesarea against Marcellus; he emphasized the will of the Father and the separate agency of the Son as the secondary, if exact, image. The church in Rome accepted the account and orthodoxy of the exiled Marcellus and Athanasius, but others of course had different views. In the West the conflict came alive only after the series of councils under Constantius, especially the Council of Sirmium in 357. This council rejected the use of ousia language altogether as unscriptural and controversial; it affirmed the superiority of the Father, and asserted that the Son was begotten and subordinate. This led to the ‘Dated’ creed of Sirmium in 359, in which the Son was affirmed to be simply ‘like the Father in all things’. The emperor Constantius found this to be theologically acute and supported the decisions of this council. The alliance which affirmed that the Son was ‘like the Father’ and ‘like according to the scriptures’ has been called the ‘Homoians’. Examining the bishops who supported this council, we find a diversity of views as well as changing theological positions which should encourage us again to think of alliances rather than dogmatic parties. The successor and follower of Eusebius of Caesarea, Acacius of Caesarea, taught that the Son was the image of the ousia of the Father, and therefore distinct and subordinate; like many, he attempted to weather the successive councils by compromise and silence, accepting at times Nicaea and at other times a more radical Homoian position (Hanson 1988: 581–3). Eudoxius was allied with the Heterousians or radical Homoians, Aetius and Eunomius, but eventually adopted a more moderate course. He was alleged by opponents to have made many provocative, and even humorous, assertions to show the transcendence and distinction of the Father; to the radical Homoians, he was a traitor by his later failure to defend Eunomius. As bishop of Constantinople, he became the advisor of Valens and the supporter of Ulfilas and his mission to Christianize the Goths (Hanson 1988: 581–8). Another series of councils shows the work of Basil of Ancyra, the leader of a network often called the Homoiousians, who affirmed a ‘like substance’ between the Father and the Son, if maintaining a hierarchy of being and action. This position was developed in reaction to both Nicene thought and the increasing radicalism and politics of some Homioans, namely Eudoxius and Aetius. Condemning the ‘modalism’ of Marcellus and the unscriptural theology of Aetius, they presented themselves as true heirs of Lucian of Antioch (Steenson 1983; Löhr 1986; Brennecke 1988). They protested against both the theology and the tactics of Eudoxius in becoming bishop of Antioch. Emperor Constantius became convinced of the orthodoxy of their position and encouraged their presence at the Council of Sirmium in 359. Constantius banished the extreme Homoians and convened yet another gathering in December 359 which seemed to affirm the Homoiousian position. Local Homoians, however, legislated against them in Constantinople, and refused to accept the statement. The party split into those who eventually accepted Nicaea and those who continued a non-Nicene position.

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end p.248

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved The complex politics of the new imperial councils, as well as the increasing local power of bishops, sparked debates concerning proper clerical behaviour and public theological discourse. Non-Nicenes were accused of being too close to the court, not practising asceticism, and exhibiting inappropriate disclosure of theological concepts. Eudoxius and, later, Eunomius were in fact well connected to the court, and perhaps exemplified a style of civic moderation as well as learned theology (Vaggione 1993; Van Dam 2003). Nicene apologetics focused on the necessary link between orthodoxy, divinization, and asceticism, especially as interpreted by bishops (Brakke 1995; Lim 1995). In Alexandria those opposed to Athanasius and Nicaea embraced different facets of urban community (Haas 1997: 274 f.). Resistant to imperial coercion, large numbers of the urban aristocracy followed this cause. In 356 young men of this class were accused of both heretical ordinations and violence against opposing churches. Given the tradition of urban violence, these groups of those receiving office and others engaging in supportive violence could be explained by class and civic pride rather than theology (Haas 1997: 276). In part this group is a response to the violence of Athanasius. However, the repressive rule of George of Cappadocia, who persecuted Jews, Christians, and pagans, broke the non-Nicene alliance of ascetics, aristocrats, and imperial officials in the city (Haas 1997: 274 f.). The most strenuous opponents of homoousios were Aetius and Eunomius, often called ‘Neo-Arians’ or Anomoeans (or more recently in Ayres (2004) ‘Heterousians’), to distinguish them from their Homoian allies. The wealth of polemical literature from Gregory Nazianzus and Basil provides a social history for this portion of the controversy which has only begun to be explored. For example, Aetius's social mobility from goldsmith to deacon in Antioch, as well as his intimidating dialectical skill, was exploited by the Cappadocians, who contrasted their own nobility of birth and ascetic philosophy with the supposedly crude marketplace antics of their rivals. Their contrast of those who were ‘made’ as opposed to those ‘born’ may have theological implications in the midst of a debate about ‘begotten’ versus ‘created’ Sons (Burrus 2000; Van Dam 2003: 17). The Anomoeans claimed that the nature of the Son must be different from that of the unbegotten Father (heterousion) or dissimilar (anomoios). Also linked to Lucian of Antioch, their relationship to Arius is an interesting one, since they seem to have embraced his focus on the singularity of the unbegotten Father, but rejected his negative epistemology. In his Syntagmation of 359 Aetius defined the divine essence as ‘ingenerate’ (agen tos), and insisted that this description was fully revelatory of God and the basis of all theological teaching, which he expressed in thirty-seven propositions (Wickham 1968). Since for him names expressed realities, ‘ingenerate’ was not merely a title, but expressed the very essence of God. Descended from a merchant family in northern Cappadocia, Eunomius met Aetius in Antioch and became his pupil. When Aetius moved to Alexandria, Eunomius acquired Eudoxius of Constantinople as a patron, and eventually became end p.249

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved bishop of Cyzicus. However, in loyally supporting his teacher Aetius, he ran afoul of Eudoxius and the court, and returned to Cappadocia. He thus went into exile several times depending on the theological position of the Emperor, lastly at the request of Theodosius (Van Dam 2003: 15–43). From extant portions of his two

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Apologies and Confession, we have a good account of his teaching, which emphasized the full revelation of the ingenerate Father through the subordinate Son. Because of this precise revelation, theologians must be exact (akribeia) in their interpretation, and this theological ability was linked to their spiritual power as teachers. This central claim that God was knowable in essence was of course in direct contradiction to Arius's earlier claims; paradoxically, the Cappadocians defended divine incomprehensibility in response to these teachings. As shown in the Apostolic Constitutions, Eunomius practised a Christocentric baptism in which believers were baptized into the death of Christ and emerged as adopted sons and daughters (Kopecek 1985; Vaggione 2000: 336–40). Philostorgius wrote a Eunomian history in which he outlined an authentic theological succession from Eusebius of Nicomedia to Eunomius. He criticized Arius for his negative theology, and Asterius for his theology of the image of the Son; akribeia in theology, and not merely ecclesiastical office, was important (Ferguson 2005; Marasco 2005). Eunomius and his followers were condemned by name at the Council of Constantinople, and their rights increasingly curtailed by imperial legislation. Ironically, their devotion to tradition and akribeia left them unable to negotiate with regard to theological terminology, and therefore increasingly isolated (Vaggione 2000: 381). In the West, theological debates also continued between those who accepted the developing Trinitarian theology of homoousios and those who did not. Ambrose in 374 succeeded a Homoian bishop, Auxentius. With the death of Valens, Ambrose moved to enforce Nicene orthodoxy in his area by condemning several local bishops. Refusing to be labeled as ‘Arian’, Palladius, the venerable bishop of Ratiaria, claimed to teach an inherited and biblical theology of a subordinate and suffering Son. Their several literary exchanges in De fide and Apologia, as well as the recorded debate at the Council of Aquileia, reflected their mutual theological, personal, and political contempt, as well as the power of emperors in religious policy (Meslin 1967: 85–92; McLynn 1991, 1994). The local enforcement of Nicene orthodoxy by Ambrose escalated tensions, and indeed a revival of the Homoian theology (D. Williams 1995). Another Auxentius of Milan, this one being a pupil of the bishop to the Goths, Ulfilas, came to Milan during Ambrose's tenure as an evangelist for the non-Nicene gospel and rebaptized converts. Valentinian legislated tolerance for Homoians, and a conflict developed over the main basilica. In the later fourth century theological power was increasingly expressed by who occupied public space and who needed to meet privately (Maier 1994; Colish 2002). The eventual change of emperor with the military success of Maximus, together with the discovery of the relics of martyrs whom Ambrose claimed as defenders of Nicaea, ended the Homoian revival. When Theodosius enforced the heresy laws in the West, the only end p.250

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved non-Nicenes publicly acknowledged seem to have been the Goths (Duval 1998). However, from the evidence of the Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum, dated to the fifth century, we learn that non-Nicenes continued to meet privately (Maier 2005). Throughout these debates we may trace a commitment of non-Nicenes to a separate and subordinate model of divinity which made them deny the equality of the Father and Son or a unity of ousia. The incomparable sovereign and creative power of the Father was consistently affirmed as an essential doctrine expressed in scripture, revealed by the Son, and logically consistent in reflections on causality: the Father is ‘incomparably greater than all’ in Julian's Commentary on Job, 9 (Hanson 1988: 101). According to the Letter of Auxentius ‘this God... in order to show his goodness and power by force of will alone, impassive and free from passion, incorruptible... made and established the only begotten God’

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(Heather and Matthews 1991: 147). This subordinate Son could then be the single subject of his cosmological and earthly activity; his essential separation from the transcendent Father ensured the reality of his obedience and suffering. Thus, many authors, including Palladius and the author of the Latin Opus imperfectum, insisted that the Son as the lesser divinity must be subject to suffering. Eudoxius noted: ‘He was passible by the Incarnation; for if only soul and body had suffered, he could not have changed the world. Let them answer then how this one... could be consubstantial with God who is beyond these things: suffering and death?’ (Hanson 1988: 112). As succinctly expressed by Vaggione, ‘Their attempt to safeguard exegesis through metaphysics made the traditional descending hierarchy a dogmatic as well as dramatic necessity’ (2000: 128). The biblical accounts of the obedient, suffering, and worshipping Christ were ensured by the hierarchical cosmology. Liturgy affirmed the saving revelation of the ingenerate God through the life and death of the Son. The strength of the non-Nicene position was thus the unity of the story of the creation and the appointment of the Son as saviour from the beginning of time (Vaggione 2000: 143–8).

12.4 Christianity and Tribal Peoples The actions and legislation of Theodosius had curtailed non-Nicene liturgical and theological life within the Roman Empire, but non-Nicene Christianity persisted until the sixth century among tribal peoples who eventually migrated into and controlled parts of the former western empire. The second canon of the Council of Constantinople in 381 had allowed the churches among the barbarians to be governed according to the rule of their fathers. Ironically, if these peoples adopted Christianity as a political courtesy to the Empire, they eventually found that their end p.251

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved version, mainly taught by Ulfilas in 360, was no longer considered to be orthodox. The prototype of this form of conversion was the Goths. After initial resistance to and persecution of Christians, Goths adopted Christianity in 376 when they crossed into the Roman Empire. Scholars concur that the Goths then maintained their non-Nicene Christianity in part as a means of distinguishing themselves as a people from the Romans; their eventual conversion to Nicene Christianity in the sixth century is therefore linked to increasing cultural assimilation (Heather 1996: 313). The Christianization of tribes through the decisions of their rulers is echoed in the non-Nicene conversions of the Suevi, Vandals, Lombards, and Burgundians, although the exact historical process or reason for these religious changes often remains unclear (Thompson 1983; Schwarcz 1999; Pohl 2000). Although we have references to Nicene Goths, such as the martyr Saba, whose relics were brought to Cappadocia, the majority of Gothic Christians were shaped by the theological inheritance of Christianity before Theodosius, including especially, but not exclusively, Ulfilas. According to his disciple, Auxentius, Ulfilas rejected the substance language of most other fourth-century theologies, preferring to describe not separate identities but rather different dispositions (adfectus). The Son was the only-begotten God created by the unbegotten Father. He therefore supported the theology of Euxodius of Constantinople in 360 concerning the ‘likeness’' of the Father and the Son, though his own theology focused on the separate functions of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In 383 he tried to persuade Theodosius of his error in accepting homoousios (Letter of Auxentius in Heather and Matthews 1991: 145–53; Wiles 1996: 43–5). He translated the Bible into Gothic, though Philostorgius claimed that he omitted the

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book of Kings so as not to encourage their aggression. Salvian argued a century later that the Goths remained ‘Arian’ because of the poor translation of their scripture, which was riddled with errors (Heather and Matthews 1991: 167–9). The Gothic translation of scripture appears at critical points to emphasize likeness between the Father and Son rather than equality or identity (Wiles 1996: 50). In the next several centuries the two forms of Christianity coexisted largely as descriptive of distinct ethnic groups. In a sixth-century manuscript Arianism was described as lex Gothorum (Heather and Matthews 1991: 245). The use of Gothic in liturgy and scripture, as well as a separate cup for aristocrats, did not encourage conversions, and the majority of local inhabitants remained Nicene. The Ostrogothic ruler Theodoric in northern Italy seemed intentionally to encourage peaceful coexistence, and intervened helpfully in a Catholic schism in Rome. His capital, Ravenna, preserves the best visual evidence of Gothic Christianity in the churches dedicated to St Apollinaris and the baptistery. In spite of much debate, most scholars conclude that little theological difference can be discerned in the images of Christ in the mosaics (Jensen 2000: 118–19; Ward-Perkins 2007). In Spain, Nicenes were ‘the Roman religion’, and Goths spoke of themselves as ‘catholic’. Some kings enjoyed theological debate about homoousios, but for the end p.252

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved most part theological conflict was expressed in competing miracles or success in battle; for example, Gregory of Tour outlined the unsuccessful healings of Arian bishops and the conversion of a king based on the miraculous power of Nicene Christianity (Van Dam 1993: 187–9). However, in North Africa the Vandal rulers pursued at times a violent policy in the interest of social unity. Nicenes were persecuted in 484, and again after a Council of Carthage in 522. Bishop Victor of Vita wrote an account of the earlier persecution modelled on the traditional genre of martyrdom which also revealed significant exchange and interaction between populations (Shanzer 2004). Their Christianity disappeared with the reconquest of North Africa by Justinian. In Visigothic Spain, Leovigild attempted to unite his kingdom in 580 by declaring the full divinity of the Son, but the inferiority of the Spirit; he also outlawed rebaptism of Nicene converts and allowed intermarriage. After his death in 587 his son Reccared ascended the throne and became a Nicene. At the Council of Toledo in 589 Nicene Christianity was formally adopted by the kingdom and its clergy, ending the ethnic division of religion; several revolts followed, as well as the unfortunate destruction of many Visigothic Christian texts. Whether or not this period may contribute only a theology ‘characterized by a ponderous and earthbound reliance on the text of the Bible’ (Thompson 1966: 123) may rest on future study of tribal peoples.

12.5 Directions for Further Study The fourth century with its theological controversies, institutional inventions, expansion of asceticism, and gradual Christianization of Roman society was a religious and social watershed in late antiquity. Studies of Arius and ‘Arianism’ therefore must continue to take into account the ever increasing resources on the history of spirituality, liturgy, and ecclesiology as well as theology to deepen our understanding of the course of the controversy. The complexity and diversity of devotional practice or the use of philosophy and scripture encourages a less binary approach to the development of Nicene orthodoxy. Attention has been shifting from Arius and the origins of the controversy to later figures, which promises to illuminate our understanding of particular theologies, as well as

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eventually shift our overall account of the development of the conflict. Many of these controversial texts would profit from readings with more attention to rhetorical or sociological models of conflict as well as theological nuance. Equally important, as the fourth-century histories of Hellenism and Judaism are revised, the polemical links in Christian theology must also be reconsidered. The cumulative weight of these particular and diverse studies therefore promise new insights into, and perhaps a new configuration of, one of the most important theological conflicts of Christian history. end p.253

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Note 1.

References to the documents of the early controversy (Urk.) refer to a collection of Greek texts by Opitz (1935). Bibliography

AYRES, L. (2004), Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). BARNES, M. (1998), ‘The Fourth Century as Trinitarian Canon’, in L. Ayres and G. Jones (eds.), Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric and Community (London: Routledge), 47–67. —— and WILLIAMS, D. (1993) (eds.), Arianism after Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth-Century Trinitarian Conflicts (Edinburgh: T & T Clark).

BARNES, T. D. (1993), Athanasius and Constantius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). BRAKKE, D. (1995), Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press). BRENNECKE, H. (1988), Studien zur Geschichte der Homöer: Der Osten bis zum Ende der homöischen Reichskirche (Tübingen: Mohr). —— (1993), ‘Lukian von Antiochien in der Geschichte arianischen Streites’, in idem, E. L. Grusmück and C. Markschies (eds.), Logos: Festschrift für Luise Abramowski (Berlin: de Gruyter), 170–92. end p.254

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved BURRUS, V. (1991), ‘The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Alexander, Athanasius, Epiphanius, and Jerome’, HTR 84: 229–48. —— (2000), ‘Begotten not Made’: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Palo

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Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press). COLISH, M. (2002), ‘Why the Portiana? Reflections on the Milanese Basilica Crisis of 386’, JECS 10: 361–72. DAVIS, S. (2004), The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and its Leadership in Late Antiquity (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press).

DRAKE, H. (2000), Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). DUVAL, Y.-M. (1998), L'extirpation de l'Arianisme en Italie du Nord et en Occident, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Aldershot: Ashgate). FERGUSON, T. (2005), The Past is Prologue: The Revolution of Nicene Historiography (Leiden: E. J. Brill). Gregg, R. (1985) (ed.), Arianism: Historical and Theological Reassessments (Philadelphia: The Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, Ltd.). —— and GROH, D. (1981), Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). GWYNN, D. (2007), The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius and the Construction of the ‘Arian Controversy’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

HAAS, C. (1997), Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). HANSON, R. P. C. (1988), The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark). HEATHER, P. (1996), The Goths (Oxford: Blackwell). —— and Matthews, J. (1991) (eds. and trans.), The Goths of the Fourth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). HEIL, U. (2002), ‘“... blossnicht wie die Manichäer!” Ein Verschlag zu den Hintergründen des arianischen Streites’, ZAC 6: 299–319. JENSEN, R. M. (2000), Understanding Early Christian Art (London: Routledge).

KEMP, E. (1955), ‘Bishops and Presbyters in Alexandria’, JEH 6: 125–42.

KINZIG, W. (1990), In Search of Asterius: Studies on the Authorship of the Psalms

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(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). KOPECEK, T. (1979), A History of Neo-Arianism, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation). —— (1985), ‘Neo-Arian Religion: The Evidence of the Apostolic Constitutions’, in R. Gregg (1985), 153–80. LIENHARD, J. (1987), ‘The Arian Controversy: Some Categories Reconsidered’, TS 48: 415–36. —— (1999), Contra Marcellum: Marcellus of Ancyra and Fourth-Century Theology (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press). LIM, R. (1995), Public Disputation, Power and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press). LÖHR, W. A. (1986), Die Entstehung der homöischen und homöusianischen Kirchenparteien: Studien zur Synodalgeschichte des 4. Jahrhunderts (Bonn: Wehle). —— (2005), ‘Arius Reconsidered: Part One’, ZAC 9: 524–60. —— (2006), ‘Arius Reconsidered: Part Two’, ZAC 10: 121–37. LORENZ, R. (1979), Arius judaizans? Untersuchungen zur dogmengeschichtlichen Einordnung des Arius (Göttingen: Vandenboeck & Ruprecht). end p.255

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved LORENZ, R. (1983), ‘Die Christusseele im arianischen Streit: nebst einigen Bemerkungen zur Quellenkritik des Arius und zur Glaubwürdigkeit des Athanasius’, ZKG 94: 1–51. LYMAN, R. (1989), ‘Arians and Manichees on Christ’, JTS 40: 493–503.

—— (1993a), Christology and Cosmology: Models of Divine Activity in Origen, Eusebius, and Athanasius (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1993b), ‘A Topography of Heresy: Mapping the Rhetorical Creation of Arianism’, in Barnes and Williams (1993), 45–62. MAIER, H. (1994), ‘Private Space as the Social Context of Arianism in Milan’, JTS 45: 72–92. —— (2005), ‘Heresy, Households, and the Disciplining of Diversity’, in V. Burrus

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MCLYNN, N. (1991), ‘The “ Apology” of Palladius: Nature and Purpose’, JTS 42: 52–76. —— (1994), Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press). Merills, A. H. (2004) (ed.), Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa (Aldershot: Ashgate). MESLIN, M. (1967), Les Ariens d' Occident (Paris: Éditions du Seuil).

OPITZ, H. G. (1935), Athanasius Werke, iii/1: Urkunden zur Geschichte des Arianischen Streites (Berlin: de Gruyter). PARVIS, S. (2006), Marcellus of Ancyra and the Lost Years of the Arian Controversy 325–343 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). POHL, W. (2000), ‘Deliberate Ambiguity—the Lombards and Christianity’, in G. Armstrong and I. N. Wood (eds.), Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals (Turnhout: Brepols), 47–58. RAPP, C. (2005), Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press).

SCHWARCZ, A. (1999), ‘Cult and Religion among the Tervingi and the Visigoths and their Conversion to Christianity’, in P. Heather (ed.), The Visigoths: From the Migration Period to the Seventh Century, An Ethnographic Perspective (San Marino, Calif.: Boydell Press). SHANZER, D. (2004), ‘Intentions and Audiences: History, Hagiography, Martyrdom and Confession in Victor of Vita's Historia Persecutionis’, in Merills (2004), 271–90. SIMONETTI, M. (1975), La crisi ariana nel IV secolo (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum). STEAD, C. (1978), ‘The Thalia of Arius and the Testimony of Athanasius’, JTS 29: 20–52. —— (1988), ‘Athanasius's Earliest Written Work?’, JTS 39: 76–91.

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved —— (2000), Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press). VAN DAM, R. (1993), Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul (Princeton: Princeton University Press). —— (2003), Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). VINZENT, M. (1993), ‘Gottes Wesen, Logos, Weisheit und Kraft bei Asterius von Kappadokien und Markell von Ankyra’, VC 47: 170–91. WARD-PERKINS, B. (2007), ‘Where is the Archaeology and Iconography of Arianism?’, in D. W. Gwynn and S. Bangert (eds.), Late Antique Archaeology, V.I: Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity (Leiden: E. J. Brill). WICKHAM, L. (1968), ‘The Syntagmation of Aetius the Anomean’, JTS 19: 532–69.

WILES, M. (1962), ‘In Defense of Arius’, JTS 13: 339–47. —— (1993), ‘Attitudes to Arius in the Arian Controversy’, in Barnes and Williams (1993), 31–44. —— (1996), Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

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WILLIAMS, D. (1995), Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Arian-Nicene Conflicts (Oxford: Clarendon Press). WILLIAMS, R. (2001), Arius: Heresy and Tradition, 2nd. edn. (London: SCM; 1st edn. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1987). end p.257

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [258]-[279]

13 Pelagius and Pelagians Mathijs Lamberigts Abstract: Introduction – The ‘Corpus Pelagianum’: A Problem – Pelagius – Caelestius – Julian of Aeclanum – Conclusion Keywords: Christ, Christian

13.1 Introduction THE Pelagian controversy is generally considered to have been the first western theological controversy. The debate between Pelagius and his followers, on the one hand, and Augustine, Jerome, Paulus Orosius, and the bishops of Rome (Innocent I, Boniface I, Celestine I, Sixtus I, Leo the Great), on the other hand, deeply influenced theological developments in the West. One may think here of Gottschalck of Orbais, Luther, Calvin, and Jansenius, who clearly took Augustine's side in the dispute about the relation between creation and salvation, nature and grace, freedom and grace, Adam versus Christ, predestination, etc. At the same time, one should remember that several of these authors, who, to a certain degree, wanted to be faithful to Augustine, were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church. Furthermore, they became the cause and object of many disputes in the Protestant communities. It should also be remembered that, from the beginning, not all of Augustine's positions in the controversy were accepted and received by tradition. To give one example, the Council of Orange (529) clearly did not follow Augustine's predestinarian ideas. With regard to the presentation of Pelagius and Pelagians as heretics, systematic theologians especially often took Augustine's presentation of these people for granted. In his extensive writings against the Pelagians, the doctor gratiae presented his opponents as enemies of grace (Bonner 1993). Excellent polemicist that he was, end p.258

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Augustine often offered the positions of his opponents in a concise and pointed summary (Wermelinger 1975). In line with Augustine, systematic theologians transformed Pelagianism into a coherent system (for a good survey, see GarciaSanchez 1978). The main features of such generalizing presentation were praise of human persons and their capacity to do what they were expected to do by God; praise of the potentialities of the free will; exclusion of a prevenient grace; reduction of grace to an external help, whereby the Law and the example of Christ were offered to human beings, who were completely free to accept or reject this help. Pelagians were accused of denying the doctrine of original sin and its consequences for human nature. At best, Pelagians were described as ‘humanists’, at worse, as naturalists (for a survey, see Lamberigts 2002). Recent historical studies not only offer a good survey of the developments in the

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research on Pelagius and Pelagianism (Garcia-Sanchez 1978; Nuvolone-Solignac 1986; Wermelinger 1989; Bonner 1996b), but also contribute to an outspoken (Greshake 1972) or a more prudent rehabilitation of at least Pelagius himself (Wermelinger 1975; Lamberigts 2000). In any case, it has become clear that a doctrine of original sin, as held by Augustine and his African colleagues, was not present in the teachings of their predecessors, either in the West or in the East. Although the Pelagian controversy took place mainly in the West, one should also pay attention to the fact that Pelagians had many contacts with the East. Pelagius, Caelestius, and Julian stayed for a longer or a shorter while in the East. Pelagian circles showed much interest in the work of Chrysostom. Some have linked the Pelagian exemplum idea to the Greek concept of paideia (Greshake 1972). With regard to the work of the Greek fathers, one might also think of Annianus of Celada (Nuvolone 1986; Pietri and Pietri 1999). Annianus, together with Pelagius, had to defend himself at the Synod of Diospolis (415). He criticized Jerome for his attack on Pelagius (Lamberigts 2002). He extensively translated work of Chrysostom in order to refute the ‘Manichaeans’ (Musurillo 1970; Skalitzky 1971). His translation of the sermons of Chrysostom on the Gospel of Matthew was dedicated to Bishop Orontius (Primmer 1972), one of the bishops who was eventually sent into exile by Zosimus. He is considered to be the translator of another collection of texts of Chrysostom (Pietri and Pietri 1999). His translation of the sermon of Chrysostom, Ad neophytos (Bouhot 1971), served Julian in his controversy with Augustine. In order to refute the allegedly Manichaean ideas in Augustine's writings, Julian made use of a translation of a work of Serapion of Thmuis against the Manichaeans (Cipriani 1987). Augustine received the acts of the Synod of Diospolis from Cyril of Alexandria (Augustine, Ep. 4*). In the context of relations between East and West, one must mention the intriguing Rufinus the Syrian. During the lawsuit at Carthage against Caelestius (411), Caelestius mentioned this Rufinus as being opposed to the idea of original sin (cf. Augustine, Pecc. or. 2. 3), a position which is indeed present in Rufinus's Libellus fidei and known to Augustine (cf. Pecc. mer. 1. 23). As a result of much scholarly end p.259

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved discussion, specialists seemed to agree that this Rufinus could be identified with the monk who lived with Jerome in Bethlehem and came to Rome about 399 (de Veer 1975). Recently, however, it was suggested that one might identify this Rufinus with Rufinus of Aquileia (Dunphy 2000). In any case, it is clear that a satisfying identification of this Rufinus would be of great help with regard to the non-eastern roots of the beginning of Pelagianism.

13.2 The ‘Corpus Pelagianum’: A Problem Due to many discoveries, the body of ‘Pelagian’ writings very much increased over the last 100 years or so, mainly due to the discovery of Pelagius's commentary on the letters of Paul, the attribution of several commentaries to Julian of Aeclanum, and the discovery of the Corpus Caspari (Caspari 1890). The Corpus Caspari consisted of the following treatises: Epistula honorificentiae tuae, Epistula humanae referent litterae (also known as Epistula ad adolescentem), Epistula de possibilitate non peccandi (also known as Epistula qualiter), Epistula sancti Sixti episcopi et martyris de divitiis, Epistula sancti Sixti episcopi et martyris de malis doctoribus et operibus fidei et de iudicio futuro, and Epistula sancti Sixti episcopi et martyris de castitate. It is rather difficult to find helpful criteria to define what belongs to Pelagian

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literature and what does not. As long as scholars disagree about the extent of the corpus of treatises written by Pelagius himself, it will remain difficult to do justice to Pelagius and the ideas he might have held. In an article published in 1934, G. de Plinval attributed about thirty-four ‘Pelagian’ writings (books, letters, smaller treatises) to Pelagius himself. As a result, Pelagius suddenly could be considered as one of the most fruitful writers of the fifth century. However, de Plinval's attributions, mostly based on vocabulary and stylistic arguments, were soon criticized by J. Kirmer (1938), J. Morris (1965), and especially R. F. Evans (1968b). According to Evans, only the following works could be safely attributed to Pelagius: his commentary on the letters of Paul, Ad Demetriadem, De virginitate, De lege divina, De vita christiana, and Ad Celantiam. Evans came to this conclusion on the basis of similarity in themes and the use of the same biblical quotations (Evans 1968a). It should be emphasized that both the commentary and the letters did not really concern the key issues in the Pelagian debate. Indeed, of works which were at stake during the controversy, De natura (Löhr 1999), Pro libero arbitrio, and, to a lesser degree, De trinitate, only fragments have been preserved, mostly thanks to Augustine, who quoted from these works in order to refute Pelagius. It goes without saying that often the critical reader misses the context within which such fragments can be found. end p.260

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Moreover, Wermelinger (1989) suggested that Evans might have attributed too many letters to Pelagius. Especially the attribution of Ad Celantiam, De divina lege, and Ad Claudiam to Pelagius was difficult to accept. Wermelinger's main argument was that Pelagius explicitly denied the authorship of some of these works, and that one has to accept that he thus lied. Further, Wermelinger hesitated about the possibility of proving authorship on the basis of philological and literary-critical arguments alone. Finally, he suggested that the content of these three letters could hardly be qualified as the doctrine of Pelagius. Other scholars, however, have continued to maintain Pelagius's authorship of these three letters (Rees 1988: 133–4; Duval 2003; Hunter 2007). The attribution of the remaining treatises of the Caspari Corpus to a specific author or authors is still a matter of debate, and it is impossible to give an exhaustive survey of all the positions taken in this regard. We limit ourselves to the essential. Evans (1968a) suggested that the author of this corpus might be a Sicilian Breton, but without success (Nuvolone 1986). The prudent attribution of the works De divitiis, De malis doctoribus, and De castitate to Sixtus, the later bishop of Rome (Nuvolone 1986; Wermelinger 1989) was, with regard to De divitiis, rejected by Kessler (1999). Nuvolone and Wermelinger had suggested this attribution on the basis of the manuscript tradition and on the fact that Sixtus was described by Augustine as a patron of Pelagius (Ep. 191. 1). Kessler rejected this attribution, however, and suggested that De divitiis was written by a spiritual author who did not belong to a Pelagian milieu. In line with Kessler, I would suggest that one should not immediately relate all kinds of ascetical ideals and societal critiques with Pelagius and Pelagianism. I am well aware of the fact that many authors, in line with Augustine, considered the promotion of such ideals as an expression of self-confidence and as a clear proof that these people exaggerated human nature's capacities. At the same time, one cannot deny that ascetical lifestyles were developing everywhere, and that the number of ascetic communities was growing; in other words, asceticism was in the air. The writings of the Caspari Corpus also promote virginity and celibacy in widowhood, and clearly prefer virginity over marriage. They highly appreciate willingness to sell everything to give it to the poor. The writings aim at a morally perfect life. They promote the reading of the Bible and Christian literature, and invite the reader to imitate Christ by searching for eternal values instead of riches, honour, and

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secular roles. The treatises give evidence of a strong belief in God's goodness, human beings' responsibilities, etc. Qualifying these treatises as Pelagian (with its ‘heretical’ connotation) seems to be an exaggeration. In that case, much ascetic literature, written before and after the Pelagian controversy, has to be labelled as ‘Pelagian heresy’. Jerome, certainly not a Pelagian, is a good example of a promoter of ascetic life in Rome. In passing, it should be mentioned that there is still a broad range of treatises, dealing with ascetic ideals, that, for better or worse, were described as Pelagian; but, again, promoting ascetic ideals does not necessarily end p.261

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved mean that one is a Pelagian (in this regard, Nuvolone 1986, s.v. ‘Fastidius’, gives a very convincing example). Further, it would be unwise to qualify Pelagius's or Pelagians' works as heretical because they were written by them. The following example can probably clarify this. The authorship of Pelagius's Epistula ad Demetriadem was, for centuries, attributed to Jerome or to Augustine because of its highly ascetic content. Once it became clear that this letter was written by Pelagius, it suddenly received epithets such as ‘un-evangelical’ and ‘non-Pauline’ (de Plinval 1943; Valero 1980), a somewhat surprising change of perspective if one takes into account that Pelagius paid much attention to Paul's letters (Souter 1926; see now also Frede 1973–4; de Bruyn 1993; Tauer 1994). Frede's studies made clear that many of the ‘Pelagian’ ideas in the commentary were later additions, not Pelagius's own opinion (also Wermelinger 1989), and that Pelagius's approach to Paul was in line with what was at the time the custom in the Latin world (Tauer 1994). Indeed, in his commentary Pelagius was influenced by a Latin, mostly North African, anti-Jewish and anti-pagan tradition (de Bruyn 1993, Tauer 1994). He was also influenced by commentaries of predecessors such as Lactantius, Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, to mention a few (Tauer 1994). At least in his commentary, Pelagius showed a great familiarity with scripture, and the often-heard critique that he was deeply influenced by Stoic philosophy has, in recent times, clearly been nuanced (cf. Tauer 1994). In passing, it must be said that already in 1516 the humanist Erasmus considered Jerome to be the author of Pelagius's commentary on Paul (PL 33. 646–909). It remains surprising that simply because the letter to Demetriasthrough the ages a real success-could be attributed to Pelagius, scholars changed their qualification of the work and that it became subject to critique. While the debate on Pelagius's authorship continues, there is, at least in the twentieth century, common agreement about the attribution of a series of exegetical commentaries to Julian of Aeclanum. Because history attributed these commentaries to other, more ‘orthodox’ authors, they were preserved, again a proof that orthodoxy or heterodoxy often depend upon what we know about the author. In any case, Julian was recognized as the author of the Tractatus prophetarum Osee, Iohel et Amos, the Expositio libri Job, and the translator of Theodore of Mopsuestia's commentary on the Psalms (at least for Ps 1–16) (CCSL 88–88A). The authorship with regard to the summary of the rest (the so-called Epitom ) is more problematic (De Coninck and D'Hont 1977). Less consensus is found with regard to the Libellus fidei. Bouwman (1957) attributed this work to Julian, and Cipriani (2004) thinks such attribution is probable. Julian's authorship is denied by Bruckner (1897), Nuvolone (1986), and Lössl (2001a). For a hesitant option, see Lamberigts (2002). While pros and cons regarding Pelagius's authorship have been well examined, one still awaits an extensive philological, literary, and theological study of the relationship between

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Julian's œuvre and the Libellus, which is often assigned to a northern Italian milieu. If this end p.262

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved opinion is correct, it would be proof that the opposition to the African perspectives was much greater than most of the surveys on the controversy suggest.

13.3 Pelagius 13.3.1 A Short Biography Pelagius was born in Brittany (Augustine, Ep. 186. 1), a fact which has led some Anglo-Saxon authors to conclude that Pelagianism might have British roots (Myres 1960; Morris 1965), although such a position is rather questionable (Liebeschuetz 1963, 1967). Pelagius went to Rome, where he received a classical education, as is evident in his commentary on the letters of Paul (Tauer 1994), and where from 380 to 410 he gained fame as a Christian ascetic and teacher, as had been the case with Jerome (Brown 1972). He was highly respected in Roman aristocratic milieux (Brown 1967, 1972). In a period when many embraced Christianity for opportunistic reasons but did not take into account the demands of this religion, Pelagius reacted against these nominal Christians and promoted a genuine Christian ascetical way of life. Because of such a plea for a true Christian life, Pelagius has often been presented as a moral theologian, promoting a church of perfect people. Such an evaluation, however, does not do justice to him and is still deeply influenced by the positions of Pelagius's opponents at the time of the controversy (Bonner 1966; Wermelinger 1989). Pelagius really wanted to be a (critical) theologian and an exegete. Already at an early stage, he criticized theological ideas of Augustine-he probably read work of Augustine in the library of Paulinus of Nola (Brown 1972)-about the dominance of grace over free will (Augustine, Persev. 20. 53) and in about 405/6 wrote a treatise on nature (Duval 1990). Before 410 he also wrote his commentary on the letters of Paul. After the invasion of the Goths in 410, Pelagius, together with Caelestius, left Italy and went to North Africa, where he arrived in Hippo and stayed for a short period in Carthage. During this stay in Carthage he twice met Augustine, to whom he had sent a letter of courtesy (den Boeft 1987; Duval 1999). Soon he left Africa and went to the East, where he lived in Palestine under the protection of Bishop John of Jerusalem and ran into trouble with Jerome (Evans 1964; 1968a, b). He remained a respected person: together with Innocent, Augustine, and Jerome, he was invited to write a treatise for Demetrias, daughter of Juliana Anicia and granddaughter of Proba, members of the aristocratic family of the Anicii. In 415 he was accused of heresy by the bishops Heros and Lazarus, both exiled in Gaul. The main inspirer of the accusations was Jerome (Nuvolone 1986). During meetings held in Jerusalem end p.263

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved and Diospolis, Pelagius was acquitted by oriental bishops, proof that there did not yet exist a kind of universal ‘orthodoxy’ on the questions of Adam's fall, original sin, free will, and grace. Augustine's accusation that this acquittal was the result of dishonesty and lies remains a matter of scholarly discussion (Evans 1964;

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Wermelinger 1989). The acquittal caused much unrest in Africa, where Augustine wrote a series of works directed against the ‘heresy’. The Africans condemned ‘Pelagian’a ideas at synods in Carthage and Milevis (416)-it is still unclear whether what was condemned was in fact held by Pelagius-and alarmed the bishop of Rome (Innocent I) and the emperor Honorius at Ravenna. Innocent deprived Pelagius and Caelestius of ecclesial communion, but gave them the possibility to appeal and to justify their positions. Both did so. Their appeals arrived in Rome after Innocent's death. Innocent's successor, Zosimus, first regarded Pelagius and Caelestius as orthodox. Both had shown their willingness to obey the Church by going in person to Rome (Caelestius) or by sending a letter and a Libellus fidei (Pelagius). It was on the basis of their oral and written testimony that Zosimus first set them free (Lamberigts 1992). However, under pressure from Africa and the court in Ravenna-Pelagius and Caelestius were both condemned at the Synod of Carthage, 1 May 418, and by a prescript of Honorius, 30 April 418-Zosimus finally condemned Pelagius and his allies with a letter, Epistula tractoria, in the summer of 418 (Lamberigts 1992). It remains a mystery why this letter, which was sent to bishops all over the empire, has been preserved only in fragments (Wermelinger 1979). What is preserved makes clear that one cannot qualify this letter as being ‘clearly Augustinian’ (Floëri 1955). Pelagius had to leave Palestine and probably took refuge in Egypt, where he died at an unknown date. Like Caelestius, Julian, and others, he was condemned at Ephesus in 431.

13.3.2 Pelagius's Basic Intuitions Because it is hard to determine exactly what can be considered Pelagius's own writings, I will present Pelagius's basic ideas on the basis of the works which are undoubtedly considered to be his own writings. Certitude and unanimity exist only with respect to the commentary on Paul, the letter to Demetrias, the Libellus fidei, and a number of fragments, including De natura and Pro libero arbitrio (Evans 1968a, b; Wermelinger 1975, 1979, 1989; Kessler 1999). Pelagius really wanted to be a man of the Church, an orthodox writer. In his writings he distanced himself explicitly from the heterodox movements of his time, including Arianism, Manichaeism, and the positions adopted by Jovinian (Bohlin 1957; Bonner 1963; Greshake 1972). Mainly because he rejected Manichaean determinism, he emphasized the existence and value of human beings' free will. He considered Manichaeism as a threat to an authentic Christian life, for its end p.264

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved deterministic view would annihilate human freedom and thus ethical responsibility. His Christology has been evaluated as orthodox (Rivière 1946; Dewart 1982). Pelagius's emphasis on human beings' freedom and responsibility was closely related to his view of God as creator. According to Pelagius, God has given human beings the ability (posse) to do what they are expected to do. The gift of the posse is the gift par excellence. Our freedom depends upon God's gift of it. God enables us to do what we must do. In other words, what is often described as a sign of Pelagian arrogance, in fact must be seen as a divine gift. What we will (velle) or actually do (facere) belongs to our responsibility; that we are enabled to will and to act belongs to God's creative activity (Greshake 1972). Does this mean that Pelagius held that human beings de facto could live a sinless life, as Jerome suggested (Dial. 1. 26)? Not at all! Pelagius did not believe that human beings could live a sinless life. A careful reading of De natura, written in about

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405/6 (Duval 1990), reveals that already at this relatively early stage, Pelagius had reacted against the charge that he had neglected God's grace. In Diospolis (415), he explicitly stated that one constantly needs this gift of grace (cf. Augustine, Pecc. or. 2. 2). Also Pelagius had a theology of grace, and this on the level of creation, revelation, and forgiveness (Bohlin 1957; Greshake 1972; Garcia-Sanchez 1978). In line with Augustine, it is often suggested that Pelagius considered Christ to be an external example, a person one should imitate. Pedagogy has made clear that imitating someone influences the one who wants to imitate. It is also a process of inner development and being influenced. This is also the case with Pelagius. Christ's example is not simply a mere external example. Imitating Christ is the result of a conscious process, of interiorization of Christ's precepts, and thus has to do with adults (Geerlings 1978). Whereas Augustine put so much emphasis on original sin and, in that context, time and again pleaded in favour of infant baptism, Pelagius first and foremost addressed himself to adults. For Pelagius, as for many of his predecessors, baptism was a break with the old, the beginning of new life, unification with Christ, enlightenment (Garcia-Sanchez 1978). The gift of baptism is more than remission of sins or a defeat of the weaknesses of the flesh. Through this gift, mediated by the Church, human beings become the image of God, enter into the community of the saints, and are invited to obedience to God under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Salvation in Christ is offered through the Church. Pelagius was a strong promoter of the sanctity of the Church and its members, but he would never accept the Novatianist idea of Christians as perfect people. Also for Pelagius, the Church consisted of saints and sinners. This explains why ideas such as humility play an important role in his writings. The emphasis on the need for repentance is to be understood not simply as a reaction against the Novatianists or Jovinianists, but as essentially part of his concern for the Church and a longing for Christian sanctity (Wermelinger 1989, rightly referring to Pelagius's commentary on the letter of Paul to the Ephesians). Christian sanctity is a task and a duty for end p.265

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved the faithful, but it is a task and duty that requires the help of Christ's grace (Garcia-Sanchez 1978; Wermelinger 1989; Thier 1999). A final remark: whether or not one shows sympathy for Pelagius and his allies, one must admit that at least some of the accusations against them are not present in their preserved writings. This is the case for the often repeated accusation that the Pelagians held a theologically indefensible distinction between the kingdom of God and eternal life (Refoulé 1963). The same must be said about the accusation that he defended an idea of sinlessness (impeccantia), an accusation formulated by Jerome (Annecchino 2004).

13.4 Caelestius In line with Augustine and Jerome, people tend to refer to Pelagius and Caelestius in one and the same breath. Augustine himself spoke in this regard of Pelagiani et Coelestiani (or Caelestiani; Nupt. 2. 8), presenting their (eventual) followers as belonging to a coherent group. Jerome explicitly describes Caelestius as a disciple of Pelagius and as the leader of the group (Jerome, Ep.133. 5). Caelestius lived an ascetic life. He seems to have been attracted by Pelagius's teachings and way of life. In Rome, he met Rufinus, who openly rejected the idea of a transmission of sin. Caelestius himself wrote a (now lost) treatise against the tradux peccati idea (Praedestinatus, 88). After the fall of Rome (410), Caelestius joined Pelagius in Africa. Caelestius wanted to become a priest in the church of

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Carthage. However, his orthodoxy was questioned by the Italian deacon Paulinus of Milan. Whether Paulinus intervened because he knew Caelestius's ideas or because he was asked to by the Africans remains unclear (Nuvolone 1986). In any case, the minutes of the meeting in Carthage (411) (Wermelinger 1975), a meeting held in the absence of Augustine, make clear that the theological positions under discussion could not be accepted by the Africans (to a large extent, the issues under discussion, up to 418, are the same: Adam's fall and the consequence for himself and his progeny, the presence of original sin in babies and the need for baptism, the value of the Law, sinlessness). At Carthage, Caelestius stated that the idea of a transmission of sin was considered to be a matter of discussion. In this regard, he explicitly mentioned Rufinus (Augustine, Pecc. or. 2. 3). Although he admitted the need for infant baptism, he did not accept that such baptism was intended for the remission of original sin (Augustine, Pecc. or. 2. 3). He was not admitted to the priesthood, and left Africa for the East, where he was ordained a priest at Ephesus. Although several theses, submitted to meetings in Jerusalem and Diospolis, were attributed to Caelestius, it is end p.266

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved hard to prove whether Caelestius really held these positions. In any case, for a short while Pelagius distanced himself from Caelestius; but a reconciliation must have taken place shortly after Diospolis (Wermelinger 1975). Like Pelagius, Caelestius was the subject of condemnations in Africa (Carthage 416, Milevis 416) and in Rome (417). Under Zosimus, Caelestius again defended his case in Rome. First he was set free conditionally-Africa was requested to prove his (and Pelagius's) heterodoxy-again a proof that ‘orthodoxy’ in this matter was still a flexible concept. Finally, because of pressure from Africa and the court at Ravenna, on the one hand, and his refusal to present himself before Zosimus for a more detailed examination of his positions, on the other hand, he was condemned by Zosimus and sent into exile. He tried to have his case be re-examined under the bishops Boniface and Celestine, but failed (Bonner 1992). In any case, a comparison of the Libellus fidei of Pelagius and Caelestius makes clear that their ideas were very near to each other (Bonner 1992). In about 428–9 Caelestius took refuge in Constantinople, but, at the instigation of Marius Mercator, was again expelled and finally condemned at the Council of Ephesus, together with Julian and his companions. Given the fact that most of his writings are lost, and attributions of preserved writings and/or fragments to Caelestius are problematic, it is rather difficult to have a clear view of his positions. But he must have been critical of the idea of a transmission of original sin. In this regard it should be repeated that Pelagius himself had also been critical of works of Augustine long before the outbreak of the controversy. It seems reasonable to suggest that Caelestius, more than Pelagius, emphasized the importance of the freedom of the will and thus paid less attention to hamartiology and soteriology (Nuvolone 1986; Wermelinger 1989; Honnay 1994; Lamberigts 2002). In any case, it may be unfair to minimize Pelagius's role at the expense of Caelestius (Honnay 1994).

13.5 Julian of Aeclanum 13.5.1 A Short Biography Julian of Aeclanum was born in Apulia in about 380. He was the son of Memor, or Memorius, who may also have been the bishop of Aeclanum and predecessor of

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Julian (Lössl 2001a), and his wife, Juliana. Julian had two sisters. He received a good literary, rhetorical, and theological education (Gennadius, Vir. ill. 46; Cipriani 1975; Lamberigts 1999; Lössl 2001a; Moreschini 2004; Santorelli 2004). In about 400 he married Titia (or Ia), the daughter of Aemilius, the bishop of Beneventum. Bishop Aemilius was sent by Innocent, bishop of Rome, to the East in order to intervene in end p.267

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved favour of John Chrysostom during the bishop's dispute with the emperor. It should be remembered that the Pelagians showed much sympathy for this Greek moral theologian. At the occasion of Julian's wedding, Paulinus of Nola, friend of Aemilius, Augustine, and Pelagius, wrote a wedding song, or epithalamium (Paulinus, Carm. 25; Lössl (2001a) offers a detailed presentation of this wedding song). During his controversy with Augustine, Julian, like Pelagius, shows a certain familiarity with some of Augustine's early works. Julian must have been a promising man, for in about 408–9 Augustine asked his father to send Julian to Hippo (Augustine, Ep. 101). Julian indeed visited Carthage, where he met the Manichaean Honoratus (Flo. 5. 26), who in 411–12 would be warned by Augustine against the adversaries of grace (Bochet 2001); but whether Julian ever met Augustine is unknown. It is worth mentioning that Julian only twice mentioned the name of Pelagius in his works against Augustine (Flo. 4. 88, 112). In both cases he explicitly expressed his sympathy for Pelagius, but literal quotations from Pelagius's work are not present in Julian's writings. Julian was really a man of the Church: when he married, he was a lector; at the time of the epistolary contacts between his father and Augustine, he was a deacon, and c.415/16 he became bishop of Aeclanum. He took care of the poor by distributing his possessions during a period of famine (Gennadius, Vir. ill. 46). From 418 onwards, Julian was the main Pelagian player in the controversy. Together with eighteen colleagues, he refused to sign Zosimus's Epistula tractoria, for people were urged to sign this letter without discussion and under pressure (Lamberigts 1992). Julian defended his position in a letter to Count Valerius at the court of Ravenna in two letters to Zosimus during a public discussion and in a letter to the bishop of Thessalonica, Rufus; but it was all in vain, for Zosimus condemned Julian. In his writings Julian showed his disappointment about the change in the pope's position. After a new condemnation of the Pelagians by the emperor (summer 419), Julian had to leave Italy (Wermelinger 1975). He regarded his controversy with Augustine as a fight against Punic and Manichaean invaders, who wanted to destroy the church in Italy. He extensively criticized the first book of Augustine's De nuptiis et concupiscentia in a work addressed to his confrère Turbantius (Ad Turbantium). Later, in eight books written to his colleague Florus (six are preserved thanks to Augustine's reply, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum), Julian responded to the second book of De nuptiis et concupiscentia (the latter was Augustine's response to a summary of Julian's Ad Turbantium; Augustine's full reply is found in Contra Julianum). Julian probably wrote his eight books Ad Florum in the East, while taking refuge with Theodore of Mopsuestia (Nuvolone 1986). The work seems to have been intended for the West, for Alypius received it during his visit to Italy (427). It is possible that Julian also wrote a treatise De bono constantiae while in the East. Of this work, which clearly refers to John Chrysostom's Quod nemo laeditur nisi a seipso (translated by Annianus), only fragments end p.268

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved are preserved. It is suggested that Julian was also condemned by Theodore (Marius Mercator, Versio symboli Theodori, ACO I, V, p. 23 ), but Marius Mercator is not always trustworthy in his information. In 429 Julian, together with Caelestius and some of his colleagues, stayed in Constantinople. Here they asked Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, for a review of their case. Although Nestorius made serious efforts to obtain information from Pope Celestine, he was not successful. Moreover, due to the interventions of Marius Mercator, Julian and his friends and Caelestius were exiled by the emperor (for details, see Lössl 2001a). The Council of Ephesus explicitly condemned the Pelagians (Lamberigts 1985). During the whole controversy, Julian had asked for an objective and open forum for discussion, but such opportunity was never given to him or any of his companions. This, too, belongs to the history of Pelagianism. Under Bishop Sixtus, Julian attempted to get a review of his case, but did not succeed. He died sometime before 455 (Lössl 2001a).

13.5.2 Julian the Exegete As mentioned above, the list of writings attributed to Julian was substantially enlarged during the twentieth century. Although his exegetical works did not play an important role in the controversy, they greatly contributed to a better understanding of this polemicist, whom Augustine described as his most intelligent opponent. Research on Julian's exegesis started only in recent times (Strobl 1991; Lössl 2001a, b, c; 2003; 2004; Pennacchio 2004). The studies of Lössl especially have opened new perspectives, for they make clear that Julian's exegetical works should not be considered merely as the work of a ‘western’ exegete-although Julian owed an important part of his exegetical ideas and approaches to Jerome (see De Coninck and D'Hont 1977: Indices; Lössl 2001a; Canellis 2004)-but that one should also take into account the exegetical work of Theodore of Mopsuestia. In any case, Julian's exegetical approach can no longer be evaluated as merely rationalist and strictly literalist. His exegesis was driven by particular theological concerns, especially those derived from Christian tradition and spirituality (Lössl 2003). In his exegesis, he was, generally speaking, in line with the approach of the Antiochene school. Julian was very much in favour of a historical understanding of scripture. However, he accepted that a biblical text could also have a typological meaning, though he was of the opinion that this kind of exegesis always should remain within well-defined limits. In any case, Julian could not accept that the truth of reason and the truth of scripture were in contradiction with each other: results of sane rational reasoning will be confirmed by scripture (Flo. 4. 136; Lössl 2003). The rationale behind this position is, of course, that scripture and reason are both gifts of God. The one who speaks in scripture is the same as the one who created rational human beings. end p.269

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Whether Julian in his controversy with Augustine was influenced by eastern ideas remains an open question. An answer to that question depends upon the chronology of Julian's work: if one assigns Julian's exegetical works to the period before the controversy with Augustine, then such influence is possible. Unfortunately, Julian seldom shows a thorough knowledge of Greek in his works against Augustine. In the debate on Romans 5 (Flo. 2) Julian does not make use of the Greek text in order to refute Augustine. Further, he mentions Theodore only once, in a vague and general way (Flo. 3. 111). When referring to Greek

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literature, Julian seems to make use of translations (see Cipriani 1987). One also has to take into account that Julian visited Theodore only in the period when he was in exile in the East, i.e. after 422. Therefore, it seems not unreasonable to assign the exegetical works chronologically after Julian's controversial literature against Augustine (Nuvolone 1986; Canellis 2004; Pennacchio 2004). However, it is possible that, at the time he wrote his Ad Florum, Julian lived in the neighbourhood of Theodore (Cipriani 1994). In any case, Julian's exegesis of Genesis shows similarities to that of Theodore, if not influences by Theodore (Cipriani 1993). Since the exegetical works as such did not play a role in the controversy, I will not discuss them here, but it should be remembered that Julian's exegesis as present in the controversy with Augustine is described as ‘well integrated in the traditional ecclesiastical context of his time’ (Lössl 2003).

13.5.3 Julian the Theologian and Polemicist Within the context of the Pelagian controversy, it is one of Julian's merits that he urged Augustine constantly to defend and explain his positions. Augustine's De nuptiis et concupiscentia, Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum, Contra Julianum, and Contra Julianum opus imperfectum, together an impressive œuvre, contain not only citations but a complete version of the books I–VI of Julian's Ad Florum, a unique phenomenon in ancient Christian polemical literature. In his works against Augustine, Julian reveals himself as a scholar with a good classical background (Lamberigts 1999; Lössl 2001a; Weber 2001). He is a sharp debater, very familiar with all the techniques that one should use in a controversy (Weber 2001, 2003; Lamberigts 2003). However, his arguments in the controversy seem to be mainly theological in nature (Lamberigts 1988; for another opinion, see Smalbrugge 2004; on possible Greek influences in Julian's theology, see Cipriani 2004). His basic axiom was the following: the good God is the creator of a good nature. This goodness of creation is a contingent one: people are created mutable and mortal. Pain and suffering do not have ‘ethical’ connotations, but belong to nature as it is created (Lössl 2002b). Evil is not considered to be a substance, a position which explains Julian's outspoken critique of Manichaeism and the way end p.270

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved in which he links Augustine to Manichaeans (Cipriani 1994). Both soul and body must be qualified as good. As a supporter of the creationist view with regard to the soul, he was of the opinion that God gives to every newborn a newly created soul, probably the best argument one can bring against Augustine's idea of original sin. Indeed, when the ethical behaviour of the human person must be situated on the level of the soul, the presence of an inherited sin in newborn infants-sin considered to be the result of an ethical act of an adult person-must be rejected. Any acceptance of sin and guilt on that level would be a criticism of God's creative activity: God himself would be responsible for this guilt, a view unacceptable to Julian (Lamberigts 1996). The conviction that God creates a new soul for every newborn also explains why, for Julian, the sin of Adam was not as dramatic as it was for Augustine. In fact, for Julian, Adam was a homo olim defunctus (Flo. 2. 163; Lamberigts 1990). All human beings are born with a free will. All are gifted with innate virtues. Therefore, all know what they have to do, and they are created by God as free human beings who can thus do what they have to do. Since Julian is convinced that God is also the creator of the body, everything that belongs to the body must be considered as good. In the context of the debate, this means that for Julian, in opposition to Augustine, concupiscence is to be qualified as good, for it is a necessary instrument for procreation. This is not to say that Julian is a promoter of sexual lust. For him,

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just as for Augustine, sexual concupiscence should be used only within the context of a legitimate marriage with the purpose of procreation. He simply considers this to be a necessary instrument to be used in order to fulfil God's command in Genesis 1: 28, ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth’. Julian appreciated the corporeality of human beings and their sexual desires as a prerequisite for bringing the natural good of marriage, procreation, to completion (Clark 1986a, b). With regard to Julian's view on sexuality, one should also take into account that Julian's medical knowledge had a role to play: concupiscence of both man and woman was considered as necessary for procreation (Brown 1983). Julian is a good example of a thinker who, in his theological reflection, integrates and elaborates what the sciences have to offer. He certainly tries to respect what is present in scripture and in Christian teaching, but does so while at the same time accepting scientific insights. Julian thus clearly presents himself as a promoter of the goodness of human beings. At the same time, he is well aware of the sinfulness of human beings. He rejects the idea that such sinfulness is the result of human nature. He considers sin to be the result of an act of a free human being. All people sin, and all are responsible for their sins (Barclift 1991). On this level, Julian presents a plea for a just God: God punishes human beings justly because of their sins, for all know what to do and thus deserve punishment. It is also on this level that he emphasizes the need to be saved by Christ. Christ forgives our sins and inspires us by his example. Within this context, it should be noted that for Julian, in opposition to Augustine, end p.271

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Christ possessed the same human nature as all other human beings. Julian did not worry about an eventual presence of concupiscence in Christ. Christ's function as an exemplum could only make sense insofar as he was, as human being, like all other human beings. The greatness of the human being Christ lay in the fact that he, a human being like us, surpasses all of us, but at the same time inspires us with his magnificent example. He invites us to imitate him (Lamberigts 2005). Membership in the Church is a way to salvation. The gift of saving grace is the offer of a loving God. As such, this grace can never force people. It can never be described as opposed to human beings' freedom. On this level, Julian seems to be a defender of a balanced, synergetic interaction between human beings' freedom and God's saving and helping grace (Lamberigts 1993). For Julian, such a position was also related to God's justice. In Julian's view, justice meant restoring to each person what is due without fraud or preferential treatment (Flo. 1. 35; McGrath 1983). This idea was not only present in Roman law, but could also be found in scripture: ‘The child will not suffer for the injustice of his parents, nor will the parents suffer for the injustice of their child. The justice of the just will be upon themselves, and the sinfulness of the sinful will be upon themselves’ (Ezek 18: 20) (see e.g. Flo. 3. 49), again a proof that Julian combined secular knowledge and scriptural material. According to Julian, God was not only a good God, but also a just God, which means that he gives every human being what he merits. In the case of original sin-which, for Julian, was synonymous with innate sin-human beings are already guilty before they are able to act properly and autonomously. As a result, they are already condemned before having acted themselves. Moreover, they are condemned by God, the good creator of both body and soul, simply because they are the result of his work. In a sense, God condemns his own work. Therefore, Julian could not accept the doctrine of original sin, not only because he believed in God as a good creator, but also because he considered this God to be a just judge of human beings, created as rational and responsible human beings, with a free will, able to choose

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good and evil. Although Julian did not accept the doctrine of original sin, he strongly promoted the baptism of children, for he considered this to be a gateway to heaven, the way to become a member of the Church, and a means of sanctifying the newly born. Needless to say, the idea of baptizing children because of original sin (i.e. because of the sin of another person) could be considered a position that was accepted in Africa at the time of the controversy. The theological motivation for this practice, however, was not universally accepted prior to the beginning of the fifth century (Lamberigts 2000). By way of conclusion, it should be stressed that Julian's role in the controversy is different from that of Pelagius. During the controversy, Pelagius had to defend himself. Julian chose to attack. He also paid much more attention to issues such as concupiscence and marriage. The overall impression remains that Julian, more than Pelagius, presented himself as a dogmatic theologian. end p.272

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13.6 Conclusion Due to intense research over the last 50 years or so, it has become clear that Pelagianism as a well-organized movement never existed. The authors, labelled as ‘Pelagians’, took different positions and discussed quite a broad range of topics. The attribution of the writings to specific authors remains, for a large part, a crux interpretum. This makes evaluation of individuals a difficult, if not impossible, task. Pelagianism as a consistent doctrine is a construction of its opponents, and Pelagius himself probably did not always recognize his own views in this construction. Such a construction does not do justice to the theological pluralism that existed at the beginning of the fifth century. The history of Pelagius and the so-called Pelagians is something of a drama. Pelagius and the Pelagians wanted to be, first and foremost, honest and genuine Christians. They wanted to take their faith seriously, and this on the level of both orthodoxy and orthopraxis. At least up to 410, their positions were not openly questioned, and their way of living was highly admired by the Roman nobility. Only in the confrontation with the African positions with regard to Adam, his fall and the consequences for his progeny, vitiated nature, the primacy of grace over human beings' free will, the uniqueness of Christ as Saviour, and the baptism of children because of original sin, did their own intuitions become suspected of heresy, although it should be admitted that several of the so-called Pelagian writings did not develop clear positions on these topics. Further, one should not forget that, at least before 410, the idea of the transmission of sin was still a matter of discussion, not a fixed doctrine. Moreover, in 415 the Synod of Diospolis acquitted Pelagius of the charges of which he was accused, and in 417 Bishop Zosimus of Rome was still convinced of Pelagius's and Caelestius's orthodoxy. Pelagius's and Caelestius's condemnations were the result of a well-organized action of the African episcopacy and of Augustine's involvement in it. Through these actions, resulting in condemnations at synods in Carthage and at Milevis (416)-decisions confirmed in a rather vague way by Innocent-and their influence at the court at Ravenna, the Africans finally succeeded in their efforts to have Pelagius and Caelestius condemned by both the western emperor and the bishop of Rome (418). The way in which Julian of Aeclanum criticized Augustine and the sometimes excellent arguments that he used in his controversy with Augustine made clear that the Augustinian positions themselves were not unproblematic, especially

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with regard to the creation of the soul, the human nature of Christ, and the baptism of children because of original sin. However, the critique was no longer taken into account, and a final condemnation of the Pelagians took place in Ephesus (431), although it is still unclear whether people there really knew what exactly they were end p.273

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved condemning. History has made clear that, despite the official condemnation of the Pelagians, western Christianity continued to struggle with issues such as the relationship between grace and free will. Too rapid condemnations seldom, if ever, are of benefit to Christianity. In any case, further research is needed. We still lack a detailed comparison of the theological positions present in the different ‘Pelagian’ writings. Do Pelagius and Julian of Aeclanum take the same positions with regard to freedom and free will, the fall of Adam, and the need of grace? There is still a need for such comparative studies. Further, it would be instructive to search for possible links between ‘Pelagian’ ideas and eastern theologies. Pelagian sympathy for John Chrysostom and Theodore's hospitality to Julian offer good reasons for such a search. It would also be interesting to compare the so-called Pelagian writings with non-Pelagian ascetic writings. This might well contribute to a redefinition of what is ‘orthodox’ or ‘heterodox’. Indeed, one has the feeling that there is a large distance between the content of a condemnation and the specific views of the condemned one. Do we really find the canons as condemned at Carthage in 418 in the works of Pelagius? I have my doubts. When Julian of Aeclanum speaks about justice, he refers to both Cicero and the Bible (Ezek 18: 20). Both references are legitimate, although they speak about concept of justice other than the one we find in Paul and Augustine. Is it not an urgent desideratum to show the complexity of the biblical language and messages, in order to do better justice to positions such as those of Julian? Does historical research not require that one take into account all elements of a dossier before formulating an evaluation? On this level, much work remains to be done. In any case, a systematic comparison of the different theologies in the West might reveal that quite a large number of non-African authors did not share all details of the African positions with regard to topics such as grace and free will, the fall of Adam, and original sin. In fact, how can authors who hold a creationist view of the soul accept the existence of original sin? end p.274

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Bibliography In this bibliography, I mostly limit myself to secondary literature. I refer as much as possible to the most recent literature. On the basis of that literature, the reader can easily discover the older studies. For the primary sources, one should simply look under the names of the authors under discussion in the excellent work of E. Deckers, Clavis patrum latinorum, 3rd augmented edn. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995).

ANNECCHINO, M. (2004), ‘La nozione di impeccantia negli scritti pelagiani’, in A. V.

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Nazzaro (ed.), Giuliano d'Eclano e l'Hirpinia Christiana: Atti del Convegno 4–6 giugno 2003 (Naples: Arte tipografica), 73–86. BARCLIFT, P. L. (1991), ‘In Controversy with Saint Augustine: Julian of Eclanum on the Nature of Sin’, RTAM 58: 5–20. BOCHET, I. (2001), ‘Honoratus: le destinaire de la Lettre 140 est-il l'ancien ami manichéen d'Augustin’, StPatr 38: 8–15. BOHLIN, T. (1957), Die Theologie des Pelagius und ihre Genesis (Uppsala: Lundequistska bokhandeln). BONNER, G. (1963), St Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies, The Library of History and Doctrine (London: SCM Press). —— (1966), ‘How Pelagian was Pelagius? An Examination of the Contentions of Torgny Bohlin’, StPatr 9: 350–8; repr. Bonner (1996a), ch. 3. —— (1992), ‘Caelestius’, Aug(L) i, 5/6: 693–8. —— (1993), ‘Augustine and Pelagianism’, AugStud 24: 27–47. —— (1996a), Church and Faith in the Patristic Tradition: Augustine, Pelagianism, and Early Christian Northumbria, Collected Studies Series, 7 (Aldershot: Variorum). —— (1996b), ‘Pelagius/Pelagianischer Streit’, in TRE xxvi. 176–85.

BOUHOT, J.-P. (1971), ‘Version inédite du sermon Ad Neophytos de saint Jean Chrysostome utilisée par saint Augustin’, REA 17: 27–41. BOUWMAN, G. (1957), ‘Zum Wortschatz des Julian von Aeclanum’, ALMA 27: 141–64. —— (1958), Des Julian von Aeclanum Kommentar zu den Propheten Osee, Joël und Amos: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Exegese (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico). BROWN, P. (1967), Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press). —— (1972), Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London: Faber & Faber). —— (1983), ‘Sexuality and Society in the Fifth Century A.D.: Augustine and Julian of Eclanum’, in E. Gabba (ed.), Tria Corda: Scritti in on ore di Arnaldo Momigliano (Como: Edizioni New Press), 49–70.

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BRUCKNER, A. (1897), Julian von Eclanum, sein Leben and seine Lehre: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Pelagianismus (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs). CANELLIS, A. (2004), ‘Julien d'Éclane et l'In Ioel de saint Jérôme’, in B. Gain, P. Jay, G. Nauroy (eds.), Chartae caritatis: Études de patristique et d'antiquité tardive en hommage à Yves-Marie Duval, Collection des Études Augustiniennes, Série Antiquité, 173 (Turnhout: Brepols), 359–75. CASPARI, C. P. (1890), Briefe, Abhandlungen und Predigten aus dem zwei letzten Jahrhunderten des kirchlichen Altertums (Christiana [Oslo]: Mallingsche Buchdruckevei; repr. Brussells: Culture et Civilisation, 1964). end p.275

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved CIPRIANI, N. (1975), ‘Aspetti letterari dell' Ad Florum di Giuliano d'Edano’, Aug 15: 125–67. —— (1987), ‘L'Autore dei testi pseudobasiliani riportati nel C. Iulianum (I, 16–17) e la polemica agostiniana di Giuliano d'Eclano’, in Congresso internazionale su S. Agostino nel XVI centenario della conversione, Roma, 15–20 settembre 1986, Atti I: Cronaca del Congresso, Sessioni generali, Sezione di Studi I, Studia Ephemeridis ‘Augustinianum’, 24 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum), 439–49. —— (1993), ‘La presenza di Teodoro di Mopsuestia nella teologia di Giuliano d'Eclano’, in Cristianesimo Latino e cultura Greca sino al sec. IV: XXI Incontro di studiosi dell'antichità cristiana, Roma, 7–9 maggio 1992, Studia Ephemeridis “Augustinianum”, 42 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum), 364–78.

—— (1994), ‘La polemica antiafricana di Giuliano d'Eclano: artificio letterario o scontro di tradizioni teologiche?’, in Cristianesimo e specificità regionali nel Mediterraneo latino (sec. IV–VI): XXII Incontro di studiosi dell'antichità cristiana, Roma, 6–8 maggio 1993, Studia Ephemeridis “Augustinianum”, 46 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum), 147–60. —— (2004), ‘Sulle fonti orientali della teologia di Giuliano d'Eclano’, in A. V. Nazzaro (ed.), Giuliano d'Eclano e l'Hirpinia Christiana: Atti del Convegno 4–6 giugno 2003 (Naples: Arte tipografica), 157–70. CLARK, E. A. (1986a), ‘Adam's Only Companion: Augustine and the Early Christian Debate on Marriage’, RechAug 21: 139–62. —— (1986b), ‘Vitiated Seeds and Holy Vessels: Augustine's Manichaean Past’, in E. A. Clark (ed.), Ascetic Piety and Woman's Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity (Lewiston, NY: Mellen), 291–349. De Coninck, L., and D'Hont, M. J. (1977) (eds.), Iuliani Aeclanensis expositio libri Iob, tractatus prophetarum Osee, Iohel et Amos, accedunt operum deperditorum

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fragmenta post Albertum Bruckner denuo collecta aucta ordinata: Theodori Mopsuesteni expositiones in Psalmos Iuliano Aeclanensi interprete in Latinum versae quae supersunt, CCSL 88–88A (Turnhout: Brepols). DE

BRUYN, Th. (1993), Pelagius' Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans

(Oxford: Clarendon Press). DEN BOEFT, J. (1987), ‘Augustine's Letter to Pelagius’, in J. den Boeft and J. van Oort (éds.), Augustiniana Traiectina: Communications présentées au Colloque International d'Utrecht, 13–14 novembre 1986, Études Augustiniennes (Paris:

L'Institut d'études augustiniennes), 73–84. DE

PLINVAL, G. (1934), ‘Recherches sur l'oeuvre littéraire de Pélage’, Revue de

Philologie, 60: 9–42. —— (1943), Pélage, ses écrits, sa vie et sa réforme (Lausanne: Payot).

—— (1959), ‘Julien d'Eclane devant la Bible’, RSR 47: 345–66. DEWART, J. McW. (1982), ‘The Christology of the Pelagian Controversy’, StPatr 17/3: 1221–44. DUNPHY , W. (2000), ‘An Unlisted Profession of Faith (Pseudo-Rufinus, De Fide)’, SacEr 39: 37–53. DUVAL, Y.-M. (1990), ‘La date du “De natura” de Pélage: les premières étapes de la controverse sur la nature de la grâce’, REAug 36: 257–83. —— (1999), ‘La correspondance entre Augustin et Pélage’, REAug 45: 363–84.

—— (2001), ‘Pélage en son temps: Données chronologiques nouvelles pour une présentation nouvelle’, StPatr 38: 95–118. end p.276

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved —— (2003), L'affaire Jovinien: D'une crise de la société romaine à une crise de la pensée chrétienne à la fin de IVe et au début de Ve siècle (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum). EVANS, R. F. (1964), ‘Pelagius’ Veracity at the Synod of Diospolis’, in J. Sommerfeldt (ed.), Studies in Medieval Culture (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan University Press), 21–30. —— (1968a), Four Letters of Pelagius (London: Black).

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—— (1968b), Pelagius: Inquiries and Reappraisals (London: Black).

FLOËRI, F. (1955), ‘Le péché originel d'après Zosime et Augustin’, in Augustinus Magister: Congrès international augustinien, Paris, 21–24 septembre 1954, (Paris: L'Institut d'études augustiniennes), 755–61. FREDE, H. J. (1973–4), Ein neuer Paulustext und Kommentar, Vetus Latina, Aus der Geschichte der lateinischen Bibel, 7–8 (Freiburg: Herder). GARCIA-SANCHEZ, C. (1978), Pelagius and Christian Initiation: A Study in Historical Theology (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press).

GEERLINGS, W. (1978), Christus Exemplum: Studien zur Christologie und Christusverkündigung Augustins, Tübinger theologische Studien, 13 (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald). GRESHAKE, G. (1972), Gnade als konkrete Freiheit: Eine Untersuchung zur Gnadenlehre des Pelagius (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald). HONNAY , G. (1994), ‘Caelestius, discipulus Pelagii’, Aug(L) 44: 271–302.

HUNTER, D. G. (2007), Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press). KESSLER, A. (1999), Reichtumskritik und Pelagianismus: Die pelagianische Diatribe de divitiis: Situierung, Lesetext, Übersetzung, Kommentar, Par. 43 (Freiburg (Schweiz): Universität Verlag). KIRMER, I. (1938), Das Eigentum des Fastidius in Pelagianischen Schriften (St Ottilien: Oberbayern). LAMBERIGTS, M. (1985), ‘Les évêques pélagiens déposés, Nestorius et Ephèse’, Aug(L) 35: 264–80. —— (1988), ‘Julian of Aeclanum: A Plea for a Good Creator’, Aug(L) 38: 5–24.

—— (1990), ‘Julien d'Eclane et Augustin d'Hippone: deux conceptions d'Adam’, Aug(L) 40: 393–435. —— (1992), ‘Augustine and Julian of Aeclanum on Zosimus’, Aug(L) 42: 311–30.

—— (1993), ‘Julian of Aeclanum on Grace: Some Considerations’, StPatr 27: 342–9. —— (1996), ‘Julian of Eclanum and Augustine on the Origin of the Soul’, Aug(L)

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46: 243–60. —— (1999), ‘Iulianus IV (Iulianus von Aeclanum)’, in RAC xix. 483–505.

—— (2000), ‘Pélage: la réhabilitation d'un hérétique’, in J. Pirotte and E. Louchez (eds.), Deux mille ans d'histoire de l'Eglise: Bilan et perspectives historiographiques, RHE 95/3 (Louvain: Université catholique de Louvain), 97–111. —— (2002), ‘Recent Research into Pelagianism with Particular Emphasis on the Role of Julian of Aeclanum’, Aug 52: 175–98. —— (2003), ‘The Italian Julian of Aeclanum about the African Augustine of Hippo’, in P.-Y. Fux, J.-M. Roessli and O. Wermelinger (eds.), Augustinus Afer: Saint Augustin: africanité et universalité, Actes du colloque international AlgerAnnaba, 1–7 avril 2001, Par. 45/1 (Fribourg: Éditions universitaires), 83–93.

end p.277

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved LAMBERIGTS, M. (2005), ‘In Defence of Jesus Christ: Augustine on Christ in the Pelagian Controversy’, AugStud 36: 159–94. LIEBESCHUETZ, W. (1963), ‘Did the Pelagian Movement have Social Aims?’, Historia, 12: 227–41. —— (1967), ‘Pelagian Evidence on the Last Period of Roman Britain?’, Latomus, 26: 436– 47. LÖHR, W. (1999), ‘Pelagius’ Schrift De natura: Rekonstruktion und Analyse’, RechAug 31: 135–94. LÖSSL, J. (2001a), Julian von Aeclanum: Studien zu seinem Leben, seinem Werk, seiner Lehre und ihrer Überlieferung, Suppl. VC, 60 (Leiden: E. J. Brill).

—— (2001b), ‘Julian of Aeclanum's Tractatus in Osee, Iohel, Amos’, Aug 51: 5–31. —— (2001c), ‘A Shift in Patristic Exegesis: Hebrew Clarity and Historical Verity in Augustine, Jerome, Julian of Aeclanum and Theodore of Mopsuestia’, AugStud 32: 157–75. —— (2002a), ‘Amos 6:1: Its Text and Ancient Translations’, Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages, 28: 43–67.

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—— (2002b), ‘Julian of Aeclanum on Pain’, JECS 10: 203–43. —— (2003), ‘Julian of Aeclanum's “Rationalist” Exegesis: Albert Bruckner Revisited’, Aug 53: 77–106. —— (2004), ‘Teodoro di Mopsuestia e Giuliano di Eclano sulle cause naturali dei terremoti’, in A. V. Nazzaro (ed.), Giuliano d'Eclano e l'Hirpinia Christiana: Atti del Convegno 4–6 giugno 2003 (Naples: Arte tipografica), 103–11. MCGRATH, A. E. (1983), ‘Divine Justice and Divine Equity in the Controversy between Augustine and Julian of Eclanum’, Downside Review, 101: 312–19.

MORESCHINI, C. (2004), ‘Natura e peccatum in Giuliano d'Eclano’, in A. V. Nazzaro (ed.), Giuliano d'Eclano e l'Hirpinia Christiana: Atti del Convegno 4–6 giugno 2003 (Naples: Arte tipografica), 55–72. MORRIS, J. (1965), ‘Pelagian Literature’, JTS

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MUSURILLO, H. (1970), ‘John Chrysostom's Homilies on Matthew and the Version of Annianus’, in Kyriakon: Festschrift Johannes Quasten, i (Münster: Aschendorff), 452–60. MYRES, J. N. L. (1960), ‘Pelagius and the End of Roman Rule in Britain’, JRS 50: 21–36. NUVOLONE, F. G. (1986), ‘Pélage et Pélagianisme, I: Les écrivains’, in DSp xii/2. 2889–2923 (with an impressive bibliography on the issue). PENNACCHIO, M. C. (2004), ‘Cum sermo propheticus absolute utrumque promiserit: l'interpretazione Giulianea del concetto di Theoria’, in A. V. Nazzaro (ed.), Giuliano d'Eclano e l'Hirpinia Christiana: Atti del Convegno 4–6 giugno 2003 (Naples: Arte tipografica), 171–89. PIETRI, Ch., and PIETRI, L. (1999), Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire, ii: Prosopographie de l'Italie chrétienne (313–604) (Rome: École française de Rome). PRIMMER, A. (1972), ‘Die Originalverfassung von Anianus' Epistula ad Orontium’, in Antidosis: Festschrift für Walther Kraus (Vienna: Böhlau), 278–89.

RACKETT, Michael R. (1997), ‘Anxious for Worldly Things: The Critique of Marriage in the Anonymous Pelagian Treatise De castitate’, StPatr 33: 229–35.

—— (2002), ‘What's Wrong with Pelagianism: Augustine and Jerome on the Dangers of Pelagius and his Followers’, AugStud 33: 223–37. REES, B. R. (1988), Pelagius: A Reluctant Heretic (Woodbridge: Boydell and

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Brewer). —— (1991), The Letters of Pelagius and his Followers (Woodbridge: Boydell Press). end p.278

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved REFOULÉ, F. (1963), ‘La distinction “Royaume de Dieu-vie éternelle”, est elle pélagienne?’, RSR 51: 247–54. RIVIÈRE, J. (1946), ‘Hétérodoxie des pélagiens en fait de rédemption?’, RHE 41: 5–43. SANTORELLI, P. (2004), ‘Note sulla terminologia retorica in Giuliano d'Eclano’, in A. V. Nazzaro (ed.), Giuliano d'Eclano e l'Hirpinia Christiana: Atti del Convegno 4–6 giugno 2003 (Naples: Arte tipografica), 73–86. SKALITZKY , R. (1971), ‘Annianus of Celeda: His Text of Chrysostom's Homilies on Matthew’, Aev 45: 208–33. SMALBRUGGE, M. (2004), ‘L'identification interdite et imposée avec Dieu: Sur le moralisme de Julien d'Éclane’, Aug(L) 54: 307–23. SOLIGNAC, A. (1986), ‘Pélage et Pélagianisme, II: Le mouvement et sa doctrine’, in DSp xii/2. 2923–36. SOUTER, A. (1926), Pelagius's Expositions of Thirteen Epistles of St Paul, TaS 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). STROBL, I. (1991), ‘Eine Untersuchung zum Verständnis alttestamentlicher Prophetie anhand des Julian von Aeclanum zugeschriebenen Kommentars zum propheten Joel’ (unpublished M. A. thesis, Vienna). TAUER, J. (1994), ‘Neue Orientierungen zur Paulusexegese des Pelagius’, Aug 34: 313–58. THIER, S. (1999), Kirche bei Pelagius, PTS 50 (Berlin: de Gruyter).

VALERO, J. B. (1980), Las bases antropologicas de Pelagio en su tratado de las Expositiones (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas). VEER, A. de (1975), ‘Le prêtre Rufinus’ (note complémentaire 11), in Œuvres de Saint Augustin 22: La crise pélagienne, ii: Introduction, traduction et notes par J. Plagnieux and F.-J. Thonnard, BA 22 (Paris: L'Institut d'études augustiniennes), 704–11. WEBER, D. (2001), ‘Klassische Literatur im Dienst theologischer Polemik: Julian

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von Eclanum, Ad Florum’, StPatr 38: 503–9. —— (2003), ‘For What is so Monstrous as What the Punic Fellow Says?’, in P.-Y. Fux, J.-M. Roessli, and O. Wermelinger (eds.), Augustinus Afer: Saint Augustin: africanité et universalité, Actes du colloque international Alger-Annaba, 1–7 avril 2001, Par. 45/1 (Fribourg: Éditions universitaires), 75–82. WERMELINGER, O. (1975), Rom und Pelagius, Päpste und Papsttum, 7 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann). —— (1979), ‘Das Pelagiusdossier in der Tractoria des Zosimus’, FZPhTh 26: 336–68. —— (1989), ‘Neuere Forschungskontroversen um Augustinus und Pelagius’, in C. Mayer, and K. H. Chelius (eds.), Internationales Symposion über den Stand der Augustinus-Forschung vom 12. bis 16. April 1987 im Schloss Rauischholzhausen der Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Cassiciacum, 39/1 (Würzburg: Augustinus Verlag), 189–217. end p.279

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [280]-[282] IV Regions end p.280

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [283]-[302]

14 The West (1): Italy, Gaul, and Spain Mark Humphries Abstract: Introduction: Gregory of Tours and the Early Christian West – From Myth to History: The Origins of Christianity in the West – The Formation of Christian Societies in the West – Politics and the Identity of Western Christendom – Prospects Keywords: Christ, Christianity, Myth, Christian

14.1 Introduction: Gregory of Tours and the Early Christian West S OMETIME around the year 576, a Gallic noble began writing what was to become his magnum opus. This aristocratic author was named Georgius Florentius Gregorius, but is better known today as Gregory of Tours, after the city in which he served as bishop from 573 until his death in 594. The work upon which he embarked was entitled Historiae (Goffart 1989). Much of the work is concerned with the Franks, a Germanic people who had taken control of much of the former Roman provinces of Gaul, Belgica, and Germania; but Gregory's conception of this work was couched primarily in religious terms. At the outset of the first of ten books, he explained that his subject would encompass the deeds of martyrs and struggles against heresy as well as the activities of kings; and he followed this with a statement of his own beliefs, through which he sought to present himself as unimpeachably orthodox—that is, to adopt his own terminology, a Catholic who believed in the unity of the Trinity. Moreover, he began his narrative with the creation of the world as it is described in scripture, and followed this with a selected account of Old and New Testament events, before proceeding to the early history of the Church in Gaul. end p.283

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Indeed, it is not until the second book of the Historiae that the Franks actually appear in Gregory's pages. This religious framework is equally explicit in Gregory's other writings. The majority of these were concerned with the deeds of martyrs and other saints who had made sacrifices on behalf of the true faith (Van Dam 1993). In the case of the Historiae, however, we see how Gregory explicitly conceived of all history —political as well as ecclesiastical—as having a place in God's creation (Heinzelmann 2001). For him, the history of Gaul, and of Christianity there, followed a particular trajectory that united the sacred history narrated in the books of the Bible with the events of his own day. This was emphasized further in the final chapter of the last book of the Historiae, where Gregory calculated in which year since the world's creation he was completing his narrative.

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Throughout the work, Gregory's portrait of the kings of the Franks conformed to this religious scheme. Thus he described the victory of Clovis over the Visigothic king Alaric II at the Battle of Vouillé (507) in terms of the support an orthodox Christian king could expect to receive from God; the defeated Alaric, by contrast, paid for his heretical beliefs by losing ‘his kingship, his subjects, and, what is more important, the life hereafter’ (Historiae, 3, pref.). Of course, Gregory was not the first Christian writer to conceive of history in these terms. He owed a considerable debt to a long line of precursors stretching back to the beginning of the fourth century, when Eusebius of Caesarea, confronted by the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, sought out a providential role for the Roman Empire in the history of humankind. Eusebius had written in the eastern empire, but his ideas were readily imported to the West through the translation into Latin, with appended continuations, of his most important historical works, the Chronicle and the Ecclesiastical History. Hence the Eusebian conception of history came to be the dominant one in western Christian late antiquity. The struggles between orthodoxy and heresy and the triumphs of the martyrs for their faith were two themes that Eusebius had decreed to be central to the history of the Church and which Gregory picked up. Eusebius had also devoted considerable space to setting out the successions of bishops in major cities (Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome), which, he held, guaranteed the preservation of pristine orthodoxy in the Church, handed down in an unbroken line since apostolic times. This too was a theme that Gregory developed for Gaul. The final chapter of the Historiae described the succession of bishops at Tours from the foundation of the see in the third century down to his own incumbency (Hist. 10. 31). Furthermore, by making the first bishop an appointee of the bishop of Rome, Gregory was able to link Catholic Christianity at Tours back to the foundation of the Christian community at Rome under the apostle Peter. For centuries, this historiographical model has dominated efforts to trace the history of Christianity in western Europe. The focus on topics such as the development of bishoprics, the cults of saints (particularly as organized under episcopal patronage), and the struggle of orthodoxy against heresy has meant that such accounts end p.284

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved have focused on the institutional history of the Church. This has tended to regard the contributions of groups that lay outside the central ecclesiastical hierarchy, such as ‘heretics’, women, or even the laity as a whole, as marginal (or, worse, deviant). It also led to a propensity—which grew more pronounced when ‘church history’ became a discipline distinct from political and social history (see Brakke 2002)—to see the development of Christianity as following its own logic, almost as if it evolved separately from society more generally. Furthermore, the traditional investigation of Christian history as church history has tended to privilege the study of written sources that tell us most about the institution and its definition of its beliefs. Even where archaeological evidence was admitted, it tended to be considered within a theological framework (e.g. Marucchi 1929). These days our approach to the evidence is altogether more sophisticated: all forms of evidence are considered as much as possible in the context of the societies in which they were produced (see Marazzi 2000). The purpose of this chapter is to capitalize on these new approaches and challenge traditional accounts of the development of Christianity in western Europe that emphasize ecclesiastical structures for their own sake. It aims to locate the history of early western Christianity—and not just the Church—in the social contexts in which it evolved and to illuminate its development by appealing to the widest range of sources possible.

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14.2 From Myth to History: The Origins of Christianity in the West The emphasis on tradition, especially ecclesiastical tradition, has had a profound influence on the study of Christian origins in the West. Gregory, as we have seen, was confident that he could trace the church at Tours back to its origins. Also in the sixth century, various compilers at Rome were putting together an account that traced the origins of the church there to the very earliest days of Christianity. The Liber Pontificalis (Book of Pontiffs) contains biographies of Roman bishops beginning with the apostle Peter, after whom came a succession of ‘popes’ in an unbroken line (Davis 2000). Even today, there are some who would subscribe to this account of Christian origins at Rome and would maintain, moreover, that it justifies the claim of the Roman Church to be the most authentic representative of Christ's teaching on earth (e.g. Guarducci 2003). Other examples of such texts exist, many of them, however, only of ninthcentury or later date. We have detailed episcopal histories for Ravenna and Naples as well as Rome, and for Gallic sees such as Metz and Le Mans (Sot 1981). In addition, by the high Middle Ages there existed for many bishoprics throughout the West lists of end p.285

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved their incumbents stretching back into the dim mists of antiquity (Duchesne 1907–15; Picard 1988). Such documents, together with the hagiographical accounts of local saints (many of them clergy), have often formed the basis even for modern historical investigations of the origins of Christianity in particular regions in the West (e.g. Lanzoni 1923). Yet, for various reasons, they are an unsatisfactory foundation for the study of the Christian West. The chief flaw of these accounts is that many of them were demonstrably concocted or manipulated to conform to ideological statements of ecclesiastical authority in the medieval period, as a number of Italian examples show. Already by the fifth century, for instance, we find bishops of Rome asserting their headship of Christianity throughout the world on the basis of the foundation of the Roman church by the apostle Peter. Yet Rome's primatial authority was frequently contested, even within the West. A tradition at Milan, for example, which traced its Christian origins to another apostle, Barnabas, a companion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles, was elaborated in the eleventh century when the Milanese church found itself locked in a bitter struggle over authority with the papacy (Humphries 1999: 61–3). Similarly, the church of Ravenna claimed to have been founded by an early bishop, Apollinaris, who was a contemporary of the apostles; by the mid-seventh century, this tradition was seemingly linked to notions that Ravenna possessed an apostolic authority independent of Rome (T. S. Brown 1979). It is possible, of course, that some of these traditional episcopal histories contain a core of accurate historical information shrouded in a fog of legend; in most cases, however, it is practically impossible to distinguish one from the other. For that reason, such texts should be treated with extreme caution, and perhaps even ignored as sources for the earliest Christianity in the West. But that too presents problems: without them, our knowledge of the origins of Christianity in western Europe loses the comfortable narrative structures that such sources provide. Contemporary accounts of the arrival of Christianity in Italy, Gaul, and Spain are lacking. For instance, none of these regions is particularly prominent in the New Testament documents, with the exception of Rome. The apostle Paul wrote his Letter to the Romans describing his plan to visit the city and, moreover, his intention to travel onwards to Spain (Rom 15: 22–8). While Paul did travel to

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the imperial capital, albeit under compulsion to stand trial, there is no compelling evidence that he travelled further west (contra Murphy-O'Connor 1996: 359–63). The sources for later periods similarly highlight the fragmentary nature of our knowledge. A church council held at Carthage c. 256 addressed a letter to clergy and laity in the Spanish cities of Legio (León), Asturica (Astorga), and Emerita (Mérida) (Cyprian, Ep. 67). This is our first glimpse of Christianity in Spain: how (and when) these congregations originated is not explained; nor can we tell very much about how large they were (Clarke 1984–9: iv. 141–5). By the end of the fourth century, it would appear that the presence of Christianity in Spain had increased considerably. Lists of clergy attending various Spanish councils in this period show end p.286

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved the existence of Christian communities in about fifty towns and cities (Vilella 2002: esp. fig. 14.1). On the face of it, this might suggest that Christianity in Spain expanded enormously over a short period. Such a hypothesis would correspond neatly with recent sociological analyses of the growth of Christianity in the Roman world that have suggested that the third and fourth centuries were a period of considerable growth, with Christian numbers rocketing from 200,000 c. 200 to perhaps as many as thirty million by the second half of the fourth century (Stark 1996; see Hopkins 1998). Looked at more closely, however, the picture is not so clear, especially for the third-century data. We have no way of knowing if the three Christian communities mentioned by the Carthaginian council were the only ones in existence in Spain at that time and must entertain the possibility (even probability) that there were others not addressed by the council. Similarly, for the congregations mentioned in fourth-century records, we have no explicit testimony of how long they had existed. Hence the growth between the mid-third and late fourth centuries might be less momentous than at first appears from a simple juxtaposition of raw data from church councils. Indeed, evidence from elsewhere suggests that evidence from conciliar records provides only a rough indication of the development of Christianity in a given region. The list of subscriptions to the Council of Arles in 314 records Aquileia in north-eastern Italy being represented by its bishop Theodore and a deacon. This is the first documentary reference to Christianity at Aquileia, but there is reason to suppose that it had been firmly established in the city for some time already. The same Bishop Theodore is recorded in inscriptions in the mosaic pavements of a church built in the city in the early fourth century. The size of this church (comprising two halls, each measuring approximately 630m2) and the lavishness of its decoration suggest that the Christian community at Aquileia was already numerous and prosperous by the time of its first appearance in the written sources (Humphries 1999: 73–9). As with the Spanish examples mentioned above, it is clear that our documentary sources provide little explanation of the processes by which Christianity arrived and developed in western Europe. Does this mean that we can recover nothing about the dynamics of early Christian expansion in the West? That, I think, would be too pessimistic. Several other considerations allow us to make some reasonable speculations. The Christian faith originated, of course, in the eastern Mediterranean, and much of the evidence shows that the earliest western communities were strongly Hellenic in character. Our earliest Christian authors from Gaul (Irenaeus of Lyons) and Italy (such as Hermas and Hippolytus) wrote in Greek. Close connections between western and eastern Churches are suggested by Eusebius's account of the persecution of Christians from Lyons and Vienne in Gaul in 177, which is cited from a description of these events in a letter sent by Christians in the two

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cities ‘to the brethren in Asia and Phrygia’ (Hist. eccl. 5. 1. 3). Such factors imply a strong immigrant presence in the earliest Christian communities in the West. end p.287

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved This in turn has prompted various suggestions about who was responsible for spreading the faith. One category that has attracted attention is traders (Frend 1964). Some evidence might seem to support this thesis. It is clear that areas with strong trading links to the wider Mediterranean world seem to have boasted the earliest Christian presences in the West. The aforementioned Aquileia was a major port city. Similarly, a map plotting the distribution of Christian communities in Spain before c. 350 shows a notable concentration in southern Iberia, a region that boasted a lively export trade in olive oil and wine. Yet, for all that, precise references to Christian traders spreading the gospel in the West are lacking. The shipowner Marcion from Asia Minor taught a brand of Christianity (later denounced as heresy) at Rome in the late second century—but it is not certain if it was maritime trade that brought him west (Lampe 2003: 241–4). It may make more sense, then, to think in terms of a variety of networks, of which trade is certainly one, that caused movements of people around the Empire and along which Christianity spread (Humphries 1998). For example, Rome attracted a diverse migrant population for various reasons, such as trade, employment, slavery, and service in the imperial administration. As a result, the city hosted a range of foreign religious traditions, including Christianity (Noy 2000; Lampe 2003). If the mechanisms by which Christianity spread to the West are unknown, they also seem to have been haphazard, in sharp contrast to the picture of organized missionary activities favoured by Christian tradition. This is apparent already in the first century. When Paul was dispatched to Rome, he found that there were already Christians in the imperial capital and at Puteoli on the Bay of Naples, his landfall in Italy (Acts 28: 14–15). The uncoordinated nature of early Christian expansion to the West is also suggested by the patchiness of its distribution there. We have already seen that it was prevalent in southern Spain while it was less common in other parts of the Iberian peninsula. In Gaul, Christian communities clustered around the valley of the river Rhône, but were sparse elsewhere. In Italy, to judge from the lists of bishoprics mentioned at third- and fourth-century church councils, there seem to have been concentrations of Christian groups in the centre of the peninsula, around Rome, and in the Po valley in the north; but elsewhere, such as in the south and in Sicily, there is no compelling evidence for Christianity before the fourth or even fifth century. That the spread of Christianity in the West was uneven is perhaps unsurprising. It should be noted also that the processes involved were by no means straightforwardly cumulative or linear. In Britain, for example, there was a Christian presence already by the time of Constantine, when bishops from London, York, and (probably) Lincoln attended the Council of Arles in 314. That such evidence provides only a very sketchy portrait of the earliest British Christianity is clear from archaeological evidence, which shows the presence of Christian buildings of fourth and fifth-century date at a variety of sites, ranging from urban centres to rural villas. This not only allows us to confirm that Christianity was more widespread than end p.288

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved the evidence of church councils would suggest, but also to speculate (in a limited

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fashion) about the size and socio-economic profile of individual Christian groups. In general, the evidence suggests that the profile of Christianity in fourthcentury Britain was comparable to that in the north-western provinces of the Empire at that time (Thomas 1981). Even so, it seems that the presence of Christianity in Britain declined, particularly in the south-east of the island, with the demise of Roman rule. By the end of the sixth century, Christianity in southern Britain had been undermined to such an extent that the island was the focus for renewed missionary activity by Irish monks and clergy from Rome. Ireland provides another example of the random, disorganized patterns of Christian expansion. In 431, one Palladius (not to be confused with the author of the Lausiac History) was appointed bishop over pre-existing Christian communities there; later, an apparently independent mission was established (perhaps in another part of the island) under the leadership of Patrick (CharlesEdwards 2003). The earliest history of Christianity in western Europe defies easy categorization. Diversity of experience is everywhere, and this is most probably to be explained by the different contexts within which the faith spread in different regions. In other words, it is absolutely crucial to see the spread of Christianity in the West in terms of the human environments that might have favoured—or hindered—its progress. Furthermore, the uneven pace at which the expansion of Christianity occurred can be paralleled when we look at its further development and institutionalization in these areas.

14.3 The Formation of Christian Societies in the West In several respects, the history of Christianity in western Europe was broadly comparable to that in other parts of the Mediterranean world. From the fourth century onwards there was a gradual eclipse of paganism and the establishment of Christianity as the region's main religion. Similarly, the western church generally came to be structured around dioceses centred on cities and administered by bishops and lesser clergy. As Christianity became more entrenched, it evolved in ways that proclaimed its increased confidence and dominance. A series of decisions made at synods in Spain about the admission of catechumens to the church provides a neat summary of this process. The fourthcentury canons ascribed to the Council of Elvira demanded a catechumenate of two years for men, five for women, and stringent regulations were to be enforced on those seeking admission to the Christian community. By the late sixth century, however, the Council of Braga required end p.289

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved a catechumenate of only 20 days. This remarkable change should perhaps be interpreted as reflecting the transformed circumstances of Christianity in Spain over the course of late antiquity. The stern rules laid down at Elvira presuppose a society in which Christians formed a quite exclusive minority, and where the threat of pagan, worldly temptation lay everywhere. The drastically foreshortened catechumenate described at Braga implies a society in which Christianity was the dominant religion and threats from non-Christian social mores had diminished correspondingly (Fern ández Ubiña 2002: 164–5). While such processes can be paralleled in other regions, it would be erroneous to assume that the development of Christianity in the West followed an identical trajectory in all respects and could thus be considered as part of some sort of grand teleological narrative of inexorable Christian triumph. Rather, there was considerable regional variation, not only between western Europe and other parts of the Mediterranean world, but also within the West itself. The place of Christianity in cities provides some striking examples. It is clear that

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the pace of development varied from city to city. Once more, our evidence is very fragmentary for the period before Constantine. The Christian communities in Spain addressed by the third-century Carthaginian council, for example, are described as comprising bishops, clergy, and laity. This hierarchy presupposes organized congregations, but precisely how organized they were remains unknown. At other times, we need to be wary of extrapolating too much from scattered details. Eusebius quotes from a letter of Pope Cornelius (251–3) which tells us that the Roman church in the mid-third century comprised a bishop, forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven subdeacons, forty-two acolytes, and fifty-two exorcists, readers, and doorkeepers, as well as supporting more than 1,500 widows and paupers (Hist. eccl. 6. 43. 11). Impressive though this is, it should not be taken as typical of the organization of western churches more broadly: the very particular circumstances of Rome, the largest metropolis in the ancient Mediterranean, almost certainly mean that this level of complexity is exceptional. If we turn to the fourth and later centuries, a similarly diverse picture presents itself. Across the Mediterranean, there was a general trend for cities to become increasingly dominated by the church, both physically, in that ecclesiastical buildings often became the most prominent structures in the urban landscape, and institutionally, with bishops often taking on important roles as community leaders (Bowersock 1986; Liebeschuetz 2001: 136–67). Such trends were certainly visible in the West; but again, change occurred at a pace specific not only to each region but also to individual centres. Consider the encroachment of Christianity on the physical fabric of the city. By c. 600, most urban centres in Spain, Gaul, and Italy will have boasted at least one substantial church building. Their scale and elaborate decoration are suggestive of the degree to which Christianity became enmeshed in the society in which it developed. Inscriptions in stone and mosaic recording the patronage of church construction and embellishment by members of local elites attest how Christianity end p.290

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved became a new outlet for the public display of social hierarchies (Caillet 1993; Ward-Perkins 1984). Yet it is difficult to generalize the processes by which this situation was achieved. Already by the mid-fourth century, some cities in western Europe boasted large churches, such as that in Aquileia; other examples can be found in Milan, Rome, and Trier. Significant differences between these cities mean that it is hard to find a typical pattern in such constructions. At Rome, the earliest large churches were built with imperial patronage (Curran 2000: 90–114; see Bowersock 2002), and subvention by the Emperor very likely explains the churches in Milan and Trier also. At Aquileia, however, there is no clear evidence of imperial benefaction. Similarly, while the churches in Trier and Milan were built in the heart of each city, the imperial foundations at Rome, such as St Peter's and St John Lateran, were built only on the margins of the urban centre. Although monumental churches appeared in some centres before the end of the fourth century, elsewhere the encroachment of Christian buildings on urban space was a later development. Many centres in Spain, for instance, had no sizeable churches before the fifth century, and in most places they seem to have been located outside city walls (Kulikowski 2004: 220–40). We have to allow, of course, for the unevenness of the archaeological record here, and the fact that even where we have no material record for church buildings, they are known from literary sources: such is the case for Tarraco, where there are no material remains pre-dating the mid-fifth century, but where an elaborate Christian

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building is implied by a description in a letter of Augustine written c. 400 (Keay 1996: 33). Moreover, the pattern of church building varied so markedly from centre to centre across the West that even within particular regions there could be considerable variety (Humphries 1999: 202–7; Loseby 1992). A similarly complex picture is presented by the development of the western episcopate. There are certainly many notable western examples of the bishop as a community leader. Thus the position of Martin of Tours (c. 361–97) as monk-bishop, of Ambrose of Milan (374–97) as a Christian leader confronting imperial authority, and of Gregory the Great of Rome (590–602) providing urban leadership at a time of political and social upheaval can be regarded as emblematic of general trends in late antique Christian society. In no small measure, the attention lavished on such figures reflects the importance that they have assumed in the Christian historical consciousness either as a result of their portraits of themselves in their writings (as is the case with Ambrose and Gregory) or because their reputation was the focus of literary endeavours by followers and admirers (as with Martin, whose achievements were celebrated by Sulpicius Severus, Venantius Fortunatus, and Gregory of Tours). The very fact that we depend on self-conscious literary portraits for our understanding of such bishops should warn us that what we are dealing with is not an objective portrait but a calculated one (see McLynn 1994 and Liebeschuetz 2005 on Ambrose). Moreover, it is clear that the achievements of one particularly dynamic end p.291

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved bishop might not be replicated by his successors. Thus, while Ambrose achieved, in large measure through his forceful personality, a considerable influence over other bishops in northern Italy (and in surrounding territories such as southern Gaul and the north-western Balkans), this did not translate into a lasting authority for the church of Milan, which began to be eroded, for example by the church of Turin, after Ambrose's death (Lizzi 1989: 209). Moreover, we should be wary of regarding expression of episcopal authority as part of some cumulative, teleological process. For instance, appeals by bishops of Rome to the apostles Peter and Paul might be perceived as reflecting a straightforward growth in the authority of the Roman see, beginning with Damasus (366–84) and reaching a crescendo under Leo I (440–61) (e.g. Ullmann 1972: 13–27). Viewed in context, however, the reality was more complex. Damasus's fostering of the cult of the Roman martyrs was probably aimed at achieving harmony in a Christian community at Rome which had been bitterly divided at the time of his election (Curran 2000: 137–55; Sághy 2000). Meanwhile, Leo's trenchant assertions of Rome's Petrine supremacy depended on the support of the emperor Valentinian III (425–55) for them to be enforced on the church in southern Gaul (Novellae Valentiniani, 17). A wider perspective on the development of the western episcopate suggests a more diverse history than a concentration on ‘heroic’ figures like Martin, Ambrose, and Gregory would suggest. Not all bishops were dynamically forceful characters. Jerome, for example, excoriated the feeble leadership of Lupicinus, bishop of his hometown of Stridon, not far from Aquileia (Ep. 7. 5). Similarly, whereas Gregory the Great might be taken as a paradigm of dynamic papal leadership at the dawn of the Middle Ages, some of his immediate predecessors (and, indeed, successors) found themselves bullied and cajoled by emperors at Constantinople who regarded the bishop of Rome as some sort of subordinate (Sotinel 2005). An equally diverse picture is presented by that corollary of the rise of Christianity

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in late antiquity, the demise of paganism. It is always difficult to gauge the nature and extent of pagan survivals, not least because we are at the mercy of ecclesiastical sources when it comes to formulating a picture of the processes involved. Christian writers tend to emphasize the conflict with paganism—but pagans themselves are much less vocal. Thus, while many fourth-century Roman senators were members of old pagan priesthoods (Salzman 2002), we should be wary of regarding them as extremists battling to defend their traditions in opposition to Christianity. That the relationship between the senator Symmachus and Ambrose of Milan encompassed both the debate on the Altar of Victory in 384 and a friendly correspondence is a reminder that pagans and Christians were not always locked in relentless struggle (Cameron 1999). Furthermore, Christian writers often condemned any manifestation of old-style pagan culture as threatening, even if those involved in maintaining such traditions were themselves Christian and did not view their actions as particularly problematic (Markus 1990). Thus, in the early fifth century, bishop Peter Chrysologus of Ravenna thundered against the display of pagan images in circus end p.292

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved processions in his city (Sermo 155). Later, Gelasius of Rome (492–6) condemned the continued participation of members of his flock in the ancient Lupercalia festival (Pomarès 1959). It is important to remember, however, that bishops' imprecations about lapses of piety have much to do with efforts to define episcopal power. Gelasius's condemnation of the Lupercalia was but one statement of authority made by him: he also criticized Christians who read popular literature, not sanctioned by the Church, about martyrs; more broadly, he was a determined advocate of Roman ecclesial supremacy (Llewellyn 1993: 38–40). Nevertheless, it is clear that paganism did survive for a considerable period beyond Constantine (MacMullen 1997). For instance, even as it acquired church buildings of grand proportions, Rome (and nearby Ostia) was also embellished through the agency of senatorial patronage with new or restored pagan temples until the 390s (Ward-Perkins 1984: 88–9). In other parts of Italy, however, the pace of change was different. Already by c. 380, the temple of Jupiter in Verona seems to have been in a ruinous state, if we are to judge from an inscription recording the re-erection in the city's forum of a statue from the temple that had lain fallen for a considerable time (Humphries 1999: 210). It is similarly difficult to quantify the displacement of paganism by Christianity in rural areas, even if excavation of many rural sites, notably villas, has yielded evidence of Christian cult rooms and small churches (Bowes 2001). The theme of the backwardness of country folk, and the responsibility of urban Christians to take the lead in securing their conversion, echoes throughout the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries in the writings of bishops such as Vigilius of Trent, Maximus of Turin, Caesarius of Arles, and Martin of Braga (Trout 1996). Once again, however, penetrating the episcopal rhetoric is far from easy. The evidence for the creation of Christian societies in western Europe presents a picture that, like that for the spread of the faith there, is characterized above all by local variation. Other examples could be marshalled in support of this argument. The spread of asceticism, for example, proceeded at different rates in different places and took manifold forms (Dunn 2000: 82–137). At times, moreover, asceticism could provoke conflicts within the Church that could seep into society more broadly, as was notably the case with the Spaniard Priscillian in the late fourth century, whose teachings prompted debates about the role of lay women in the Christian community (Burrus 1996; Chadwick 1976; Escribano Paño 2002). So too, the involvement of social elites in the running of their local churches occurred in different ways. In Spain and Gaul, local aristocrats were

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entering the episcopate in increasing numbers by the fifth century (Van Dam 1985: 141–56), but in Italy secular career paths continued to dominate aristocratic ambitions well into the sixth century (Bartlett 2001). Equally, the veneration of saints and relics, perhaps one of the salient characteristics of early medieval Christianity, manifested itself differently between, and within, regions, making casual generalizations about the cult of saints unwise (Van Dam 1993). Thus, while western Europe was substantially Christian by the end of the sixth century, it is crucial not to lose sight of either the end p.293

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved varied processes through which this situation was achieved or the diverse character of the end result.

14.4 Politics and the Identity of Western Christendom None of this is to say that Christianity in western Europe developed in isolation from the rest of the Christian world. Awareness of broader currents in the development of the religion throughout the Mediterranean world can be demonstrated from very early on. We have already seen Christians in Lyons and Vienne writing about their experience of persecution in 177 to their brethren in Asia Minor. Not much later, Irenaeus of Lyons wrote a detailed refutation of a brand of Christianity that he denounced as heresy and termed ‘Gnostic’. Manuscripts discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 included a number of texts that Irenaeus apparently had in mind when composing his polemic, thus confirming that he was well versed in heterodox beliefs popular far beyond his own province of Gaul. Nevertheless, western involvement in wider Christian affairs often followed a peculiarly western trajectory. For example, traditional histories of the church in the fourth century are often dominated by the dispute about the Trinity that raged between the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381). The theological debates of this conflict were largely played out in the eastern Mediterranean, however, and western involvement was tardy. Only when the emperor Constantius II, in the process of imposing his authority over the West after defeating the usurper Magnentius in 353, sought to achieve ecclesiastical uniformity throughout the Roman Empire were bishops in western Europe confronted with doctrinal formulations about which, at first, many of them were plainly ill-informed. Thereafter, western bishops such as Hilary of Poitiers, Eusebius of Vercelli, and Ambrose of Milan were compelled to reach a more sophisticated understanding of Trinitarian theology (Williams 1995). Even so, certain westerners' grasp of the theological issues remained idiosyncratic. Thus when Filastrius of Brescia (c. 380) composed a handbook on heresy, he gave a misleading account of the teachings of the Alexandrian priest Arius; his portrait of ‘Arian’ theology seems to owe more to doctrinal opinions held by contemporary bishops in the western Balkans, against whom Filastrius and other western churchmen found themselves opposed (Humphries 1999: 133–5). That western engagement with debates in the wider Christian world should hinge on so apparently haphazard an event as an emperor's campaigns against a usurper reminds us not to underestimate the extent to which the political history of Western Europe has influenced the development of Christianity there. This can be seen, for end p.294

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© Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved instance, in the way in which particular cities became important episcopal sees. The dominance of Milan under Ambrose was in no small measure related to the presence there of the imperial court. Later, when the emperors moved to Ravenna, it grew in ecclesiastical stature (Markus 1997: 143–7). Similarly, the move of the headquarters of the praetorian prefect of Gaul from Trier to Arles sometime around 400 led to an increase in the influence of the latter city's bishop (Mathisen 1989: 18–26; see Loseby 1996). In broader terms, the period between 100 and 600 saw in western Europe the displacement of Roman power by a number of barbarian kingdoms. For the Christians of Gaul, this meant living under Franks who espoused Catholic Christianity, a factor that may have assisted the transition from Roman to barbarian rule. In Spain and Italy, pre-existing Christian populations found themselves living under Gothic overlords whose Christianity was of a heterodox, Arian variety. In stark contrast to the experience of their brethren living under Vandal rule in Africa, however, Spanish and Italian Catholics did not suffer any systematic persecution. Indeed, in Spain Catholics and Arians existed side by side, with many communities having not one, but two, bishops. Furthermore, at the Fourth Council of Toledo in 590, King Reccared opted to abandon Arianism in favour of Catholicism, a decision that very probably reflected a tendency towards integration between Hispano-Romans and Goths across doctrinal boundaries (Stocking 2000). Paradoxically, greater trauma was unleashed on Italian Christians by the Byzantine reconquest launched by the emperor Justinian in 535. Once Italy was brought back into the imperial orbit, its bishops were expected to acquiesce in doctrinal rulings emanating from Constantinople. When Justinian ordered the condemnation of the ‘Three Chapters’, and secured, under duress, the acquiescence of Pope Vigilius and his successor Pelagius, a number of north Italian churches broke off communion with Rome, thus undoing much of the work of fourth- and fifth-century bishops of Rome in seeking to establish the primacy of the Roman church (Markus 1997: 125–40). If Gregory the Great was able to secure some recovery in papal fortunes, this owed much to contemporary political upheavals: in the face of Lombard conquests in Italy, the church of Rome was able to provide an element of social leadership that filled a gap left by the beleaguered Byzantine military administration (Humphries 2000).

14.5 Prospects This chapter has argued that the early history of Christianity in western Europe, however much it was marked by trends observable elsewhere in the Mediterranean, was profoundly influenced by the social, political, and cultural circumstances of the end p.295

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved region within which it evolved. It is important to keep these regional (and local) horizons in view at all times, rather than attempt to squeeze what is known about early Christianity in the West into a framework of pan-Mediterranean ecclesiastical history derived from Eusebius of Caesarea and his successors. In terms of approach, this requires a nuanced reading of the literary and documentary sources—a reading that almost goes against the grain of such writings, since, by their very nature, they often support the thrust of the ecclesiastical historiographical model. Equally, it is important to take account of non-traditional sources, notably archaeology, that sometimes confound expectations derived from written documents. Moreover, this fund of material evidence is constantly increasing, and continually requires us to re-evaluate our

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interpretations. Just 10 years ago, it could be written of Spain that ‘little is known about the advent and broader impact of the church as a focus for a new form of urban spirit’ (Keay 1996: 19). Since then, a major synthesis of the development of late antique Iberia has exploited a rich seam of archaeological evidence to examine the ways in which Christianity was deeply influenced by the society in which it was embedded (Kulikowski 2004). From this example, it is clear that much has been done to elucidate the history and character of early Christianity in western Europe; equally, however, there remains much to be done. Suggested Reading Many of the primary sources for the early Christian West are increasingly available in English translation. For Gregory of Tours, see Thorpe (1974) for the Histories, and, for the minor works, James (1991) and Van Dam (1988a, b; 1993). See Klingshirn (1994) for Caesarius of Arles. Among the Spanish sources now available, note especially the chronicles in Wolf (1999) and the saints' lives in Fear (1997). Italian bishops are well represented: see Liebeschuetz (2005) and Ramsay (1997) for Ambrose, Ramsay (1989) for Maximus of Turin, Ganss (1953) for Peter Chrysologus, and Martyn (2004) and Moorhead (2005) for Gregory the Great; while Davis (2000) provides a comprehensible access to the difficult Liber Pontificalis. Lives of some important western bishops are contained in Hoare (1954). Hillgarth (1969) and Peters (1975) are useful anthologies. For the problems presented by the sources, Mathisen and Shanzer (2001) provide a collection of recent case-studies. Gregory of Tours is best approached via Heinzelmann (2001) and Van Dam (1993). On episcopal lists, Picard (1988) is magnificent; those who do not read French will find plenty that is useful in Pizarro (1995). For individual regions, Griffe (1964–6) remains valuable on Gaul, but should be supplemented by Harries (1992, 1994), Mathisen (1989), and Van Dam (1985). For Italy, there are many recent studies (in Italian) of particular regions: Campione (2000), Greco (1999), Lizzi (1989), Otranto (1990); on Rome, Pietri (1976, in French) is still fundamental. Up-to-date material in English is more rare. There are useful essays on the church and the papacy in La Rocca (2002). On Rome, Krautheimer (1980) is the classic study, although some of his assumptions are challenged by new archaeological discoveries: see Curran (2000) and Humphries (2001, 2007). end p.296

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved On the Po valley, see Humphries (1999) and Lizzi (1990). Wilson (1990: ch. 8) surveys early Christianity in Sicily. For Spain there is now the synthesis of Kulikowski (2004), but those who can read Spanish will find Teja (2002) valuable. Numerous western bishops have been the focus of some recent valuable studies: Klingshirn (1993), McLynn (1994), Markus (1997), and Stancliffe (1983). For the whole subject, P. Brown (2003) and Smith (2005) provide masterly surveys. Bibliography

BARTLETT, R. (2001), ‘Aristocracy and Asceticism: The Letters of Ennodius and the Gallic and Italian Churches’, in Mathisen and Shanzer (2001), 201–16. BOWERSOCK, G. W. (1986), ‘From Emperor to Bishop: The Self-conscious Transformation of Political Power in the Fourth Century AD’, Classical Philology, 81: 298–307. —— (2002), ‘Peter and Constantine’, in J.-M. Carrié and R. Lizzi Testa (eds.),

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BOWES, K. (2001), ‘“...Nec sedere in villam”: Villa Churches, Rural Piety and the Priscillianist Controversy’, in T. S. Burns and J. W. Eadie (eds.), Urban Centres and Rural Contexts in Late Antiquity (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press), 323–48. BRAKKE, D. (2002), ‘The Early Church in North America: Late Antiquity, Theory, and Early Christianity’, CH 71: 473–91. BROWN, P. (2003), The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity

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200–1000, 2nd edn. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell). BROWN, T. S. (1979), ‘The Church of Ravenna and the Imperial Administration in the Seventh Century’, English Historical Review, 94: 1–28. BURRUS, V. (1996), The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy (Berkeley: University of California Press).

CAILLET, J.-P. (1993), L'évergétisme monumental chrétien en Italie et à ses marges (Rome: École française de Rome). CAMERON, A. (1999), ‘The Last Pagans of Rome’, in W. V. Harris (ed.), The Transformation of Vrbs Roma in Late Antiquity, JRA Suppl. 33 (Portsmonth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology), 109–22. CAMPIONE, A. (2000), La Basilicata paleocristiana: diocesi e culti, Scavi e ricerche, 13 (Bari: Edipuglia). CHADWICK, H. (1976), Priscillian of Avila: The Occult and the Charismatic in the Early Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press). CHARLES-EDWARDS, T. (2003), ‘Conversion to Christianity’, in idem (ed.), After Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 103–39. CHRISTIE, N., and LOSEBY , S. T. (1996) (eds.), Towns in Transition: Urban Evolution in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate). CLARKE, G. W. (1984–9), The Letters of St Cyprian of Carthage ACW 43, 44, 46, 47 (New York: Newman Press/Paulist Press). CURRAN, J. R. (2000), Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press). end p.297

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© Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved DAVIS, R. (2000), The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis), rev. edn. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). DUCHESNE, L. (1907–15), Fastes épiscopaux de l'ancienne Gaule, 3 vols. (Paris: A. Fontemoing). DUNN, M. (2000), The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell). ESCRIBANO PANO, M. V. (2002), ‘La disputa priscilianista’, in Teja (2002), 205–30. FEAR, A. T. (1997), Lives of the Visigothic Fathers (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). FERNÁNDEZ UBINA, J. (2002), ‘La iglesia y la formacíon de la jerarquía ecclesiástica’, in Teja (2002), 161–203. FREND, W. H. C. (1964), ‘A Note on the Influence of Greek Immigrants on the Spread of Christianity to the West’, in A. Stuiber (ed), Mullus: Festschrift für Theodor Klauser, JAC, Ergänzungsband 1 (Münster: Aschendorff), 125–9.

GANSS, G. E. (1953), St Peter Chrysologus, Sermons; St Valerian, Homilies (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press). GOFFART, W. (1989), ‘From Historiae to Historia Francorum and Back Again: Aspects of the Textual History of Gregory of Tours’, in idem, Rome's Fall and After (London: Hambledon Press), 255–74. GRECO, R. (1999), Pagani e Cristiani a Siracusa tra il III e il IV secolo D. C., Supplementi a Kokalos, 16 (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider). GRIFFE, E. (1964–6), La Gaule chrétienne à l'epoque romaine, 3 vols. (Paris: Letouzey et Ané). GUARDUCCI, M. (2003), The Primacy of the Church of Rome: Documents, Reflections, Proofs (San Francisco: Ignatius Press). HARRIES, J. D. (1992), ‘Christianity and the City in Late Roman Gaul’, in J. Rich (ed.), The City in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge), 77–98. —— (1994), Sidonius Apollinaris and the Fall of Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

HEINZELMANN, M. (2001), Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). HILLGARTH, J. N. (1969), The Conversion of Western Europe, 350–750 (Englewood

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Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall). HOARE, F. J. (1954), The Western Fathers (London: Sheed and Ward).

HOPKINS, K. (1998), ‘Christian Number and its Implications’, JECS 6: 185–226.

HUMPHRIES, M. (1998), ‘Trading Gods in Northern Italy’, in H. Parkins and C. Smith (eds.), Trade, Traders and the Ancient City (London: Routledge), 203–24.

—— (1999), Communities of the Blessed: Social Environment and Religious Change in Northern Italy, AD 200–400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

—— (2000), ‘Italy, AD 425–605’, in A. Cameron, B. Ward-Perkins, and M. Whitby (eds.), CAH, xiv: Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors AD 425–600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 525–51. —— (2001), ‘Constantine, Christianity, and Rome’, Hermathena, 171: 47–63.

—— (2007), ‘From Emperor to Pope? Ceremonial, space, and authority in Rome from Constantine to Gregory the Great’, in K. Cooper and J. Hillner (eds.), Dynasty, Patronage, and Authority in a Christian Capital: Rome, c. 350–850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 21–58. JAMES, E. (1991), Gregory of Tours: Life of the Fathers (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). KEAY , S. J. (1996), ‘Tarraco in Late Antiquity’, in Christie and Loseby (1996), 18–44. end p.298

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved KLINGSHIRN, W. (1993), Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— (1994), Caesarius of Arles: Life, Testament, Letters (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). KRAUTHEIMER, R. (1980), Rome, Profile of a City, 312–1308 (Princeton: Princeton University Press). KULIKOWSKI, M. (2004), Late Roman Spain and its Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).

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LAMPE, P. (2003), From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). LANZONI, F. (1923), Le orgini delle diocesi antiche d'Italia, Studi e Testi, 35 (Rome: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana). LA ROCCA, C. (2002) (ed.), Italy in the Early Middle Ages, 476–1000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). LIEBESCHUETZ, J. H. W. G. (2001), The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press). —— (2005), Ambrose of Milan: Political Letters and Speeches (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). LIZZI, R. (1989), Vescovi e strutture ecclesiastiche nella città tardoantica: L'Italia Annonaria nel IV–V secolo D.C. (Como: New Press). —— (1990), ‘Ambrose's Contemporaries and the Christianisation of Northern Italy’, JRS 80: 156–73. LLEWELLYN, P. (1993), Rome in the Dark Ages, 2nd edn. (London: Constable & Robinson Ltd.). LOSEBY , S. T. (1992), ‘Bishops and Cathedrals: Order and Diversity in the FifthCentury Urban Landscape of Southern Gaul’, in J. Drinkwater and H. Elton (eds.), Fifth-century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 144–55. —— (1996), ‘Arles in Late Antiquity: Gallula Roma Arelas and Urbs Genesii’, in Christie and Loseby (1996), 45–70. MCLYNN, N. B. (1994), Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press). MACMULLEN, R. (1997), Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. (New Haven: Yale University Press). MARAZZI, F. (2000), ‘Rome in Transition: Economic and Political Change in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries’, in J. M. H. Smith (ed.), Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West: Essays in honour of Donald A. Bullough (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 21–41. MARKUS, R. A. (1990), The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— (1997), Gregory the Great and his World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). MARTYN, J. R. C. (2004), The Letters of Gregory the Great, Mediaeval Sources in

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Translation, 40 (Turnhout: Brepols). MARUCCHI, O. (1929), The Evidence of the Catacombs for the Doctrines and Organisation of the Primitive Church (London: Sheed and Ward). MATHISEN, R. W. (1989), Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth Century Gaul (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press).

—— SHANZER, D. (eds.) (2001), Society and Culture in Late Antique Gaul: Revisiting the Sources (Aldershot: Ashgate). end p.299

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MOORHEAD, J. (2005), Gregory the Great (London: Routledge). MURPHY -O'CONNOR, J. (1996), Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press). NOY , D. (2000), Foreigners at Rome: Citizens and Strangers (London: Duckworth; Swansea: Classical Press of Wales). OTRANTO, G. (1990), Italia meridionale e puglia paleocristiana: saggi storici, Scavi e ricerche, 5 (Bari: Edipuglia). PETERS, E. (1975), Monks, Bishops, and Pagans: Christian Culture in Gaul and Italy, 500–700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). PICARD, J.-C. (1988), Le souvenir des évêques: sépultures, listes épiscopales et culte des évêques en Italie du Nord des origines au Xe siècle (Rome: École française de Rome). PIETRI, C. (1976), Roma christiana: recherches sur l'Église de Rome, son organisation, sa politique, son idéologie de Miltiade à Sixte III (311–440) (Rome: École française de Rome). PIZARRO, J. M. (1995) Writing Ravenna: The Liber Pontificalis of Andreas Agnellus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). POMARÈS, G. (1959), Lettre contre les Lupercales et Dix-huit messes du Sacramentaire léonien, SC 65 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf). RAMSAY , B. (1989), The Sermons of Maximus of Turin, ACW 50 (New York: Newman Press/Paulist Press). —— (1997), Ambrose (London: Routledge).

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SÁGHY , M. (2000), ‘Scinditur in partes populus: Pope Damasus and the Martyrs of Rome’, Early Medieval Europe, 9: 273–87. SALZMAN, M. R. (2002), The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). SMITH, J. M. H. (2005), Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500–1000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). SOT, M. (1981), ‘Arguments hagiographiques et historiographiques dans les “Gesta episcoporum”,’, in Hagiographies: Culture et sociétés, IV e –XII e siècles (Paris: L'Institutd' études augustiniennes), 95–104. SOTINEL, C. (2005), ‘Emperors and Popes in the Sixth Century: The Western View’, in M. Maas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 267–315. STANCLIFFE, C. (1983), St Martin and his Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus (Oxford: Clarendon Press). STARK, R. (1996), The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton: Princeton University Press). STOCKING, R. L. (2000), Bishops, Councils, and Consensus in the Visigothic Kingdom, 589–633 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). TEJA, R. (2002) (ed.), La Hispania del siglo IV: administración, economía, sociedad, cristianización, Munera, 19 (Bari: Edipuglia). THOMAS, C. (1981), Christianily in Roman Britain to AD 500 (London: Batsford).

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Map 15.1 Roman North Africa end p.302

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [303]-[322]

15 The West (2): North Africa Éric Rebillard Abstract: The Origins of Christianity in North Africa – Tertullian and the Christians in Carthage at the End of the Second Century – Cyprian and the Organization of the African Church in the Third Century – The Persecutions in North Africa – The Origins of Donatism – Donatist Martyr Stories – The Conference of Carthage in 411 – Interpretations of Donatism – Augustine and the Limits of Christianization of North Africa – The End of Christianity in North Africa? Keywords: Christ, Christianity, Church, Martyr, Christian RATHER than provide a continuous narrative, this chapter tries to bring to the fore some exceptional documents that allow the historian to go beyond the received view of the history of Christianity in North Africa. It also deliberately focuses on the literary sources, although the archaeological and epigraphic evidence is abundant. This choice is justified only insofar as it would be difficult to deal with both the literary and the non-literary evidence on their own terms within the limits of a chapter, which wants to be an invitation to read afresh some documents known for a long time and to discover documents recently made available to scholars.

15.1 The Origins of Christianity in North Africa The origins of Christianity in North Africa is a vexed question, and already in antiquity very little seems to have been known. Tertullian implies the existence of very strong ties between Rome and Carthage (Praescr. 36. 2, 4), but never explicitly says that the North African church was first settled by Rome (Barnes 1985: 67; but see Dunn 2001: 408–10). The hypothesis of a Jewish origin has no better ground (Barnes 1985: 273–5). Interestingly, in Augustine's debate with the Donatists, who argued for end p.303

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved a form of African isolationism (at least according to Augustine) by mentioning the late arrival of Christianity in Africa, he cannot oppose them with a more precise answer than that Africa had an ‘apostolic origin’ (for example, Psal. 44. 23). In a letter, he mentions the strong links with Rome and with ‘all the other regions from where the gospel came to Africa’ (Ep. 43. 7). A multiple origin for African Christianity seems a very reasonable hypothesis (Telfer 1961). It is not before the Byzantine period that legends attributing the evangelization of Africa to Peter and other apostles appeared. The first African Christians we know about are the Scillitan martyrs executed by the proconsul Saturninus in 180 (Musurillo 1972; Ruggiero 1991). Scilli, the

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hometown of the martyrs, cannot be located, but the involvement of the proconsul implies that it was in the province of Africa Proconsularis. Since we have a fairly good knowledge of African cities, we can assume that Scilli was a (very) small one, which attests that already in 180 Christianity was present in the African countryside.

15.2 Tertullian and the Christians in Carthage at the End of the Second Century If the beginnings of Christianity in Africa are rather obscure, its development at the turn of the second to the third century is well documented thanks to the exceptional testimony of Tertullian. Little is known about Tertullian himself (Barnes 1985; Dunn 2004b). His dates of birth and death are uncertain, but he wrote during the reigns of Septimius Severus (193–211) and Caracalla (211–17). His writings attest a good education; nowadays the identification with the jurist Tertullianus is not retained. Jerome says that Tertullian was a presbyter of the church of Carthage (Vir. ill. 53), but there is no external evidence to either confirm or deny his statement. The old hypothesis of the existence of a catechetical school in Carthage on the model of the Alexandrian one, whose head would have been Tertullian, has been definitively abandoned. In the context of what we now know of the organization of Christian groups at the end of the second century, the question of the status of Tertullian is less relevant than was earlier believed. We will come back to this when we will consider the question of his separation from the Catholics. Several hints in Tertullian's works let us see that at least some Christians were known as such by their fellow citizens in Carthage. First, it was easy to identify the Christians as groups. In Ad Nationes 1. 7. 19 Tertullian says that the Roman officials knew when and where they gathered for their rites, and in several other texts he end p.304

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved suggests that it was there that they were usually arrested (Apol. 7. 4; Fuga pers. 3. 2; see White 1997: 54–62). The meeting place or places of the Christians in Carthage at that time have not been identified or located (Ennabli 1997), but they were known to the non-Christians, a fact that invites us to qualify the ‘private’ status usually granted to them. Second, as Tertullian ironically suggests by saying in De spectaculis 27. 2 that a Christian who goes to the games must not fear anything from the pagans, it was not possible to identify a Christian from outside. However, in interpersonal relations it was difficult, if not impossible, to hide one's Christian identity. In the Apologeticus 3. 1, Tertullian argues that pagans' hatred drives them to ignore the personal qualities of Christians because of their faith; to support his position, he invents comments made by pagans about some of their fellow citizens who converted to Christianity: “‘A good man, they say, this Caius Seius, only that he is a Christian.” Then another says: “I am surprised that that wise man, Lucius Titius, has suddenly become a Christian.”’ The names are fictitious, but it is very likely that conversions to Christianity engendered comments among neighbours, friends, and relations. In the De idololatria, Tertullian depicts the ‘world full of gods’ (Hopkins 1999) in which Christians were living, and he uses the word timiditas three times to describe the fear of being identified as a Christian in personal interactions: in 13. 1 about the participation in public feasts, in 20. 1 about the reluctance to pronounce the name of the pagan gods, and in 21. 1 about oaths and maledictions. It was in daily life and in normal interactions that their religious affiliation could singularize the Christians and therefore expose

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them to denunciations in periods of persecution. Third, according to Tertullian, the Christians had become so numerous and belonged to so many different social classes that it was impossible to avoid them in any kind of social interaction (Apol. 37. 4–8; see also Scap. 2 and 5; Ad. Iud. 7. 5; Cor. mil. 12). These affirmations have of course no numerical value, but the great social variety of the Christians has been amply confirmed by modern historians (Schöllgen 1984). Tertullian's exact social status might be difficult to recover, but he certainly belonged to the upper literary circle of Carthage (Barnes 1985: 69; Schöllgen 1984: 176–89). In his works there are allusions to Christians from the three orders of senators, equestrians, and decurions, even if it is impossible to evaluate their number (Schöllgen 1984: 223). The majority of Christians belonged, however, to the urban plebs, a mix of highly qualified workers, small shopkeepers, and occasional workers in the harbour, not usually mentioned with much precision in our sources as their integration into the church did not present any problem (Schöllgen 1984: 267). What was the attitude of these Christians toward contemporary society? They were obviously more integrated than Tertullian would have liked them to be. The De idololatria is a very interesting text in this regard. It has too often been read as if Tertullian's attitude was representative of all Christians, when in fact it is possible to find in the text clear echoes of different points of view. Tertullian criticizes end p.305

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Christians for improper use of scripture to defend their choices. The passage, 1 Corinthians 7: 20, ‘Each one should remain in the situation which he was in when God called him’, was thus mentioned by artists who did not intend to stop working for pagan temples (Idol. 5. 1), and Romans 12: 15, ‘Rejoice with those who rejoice’, by Christians who wished to take part in public festivals (Idol. 13. 2). Even Tertullian is more nuanced than is sometimes recognized. He would rather see Christians not be teachers of literature, but he insists on the need for Christians to be instructed in literature (Idol. 10). Such a discussion reveals that, on the one hand, some converted schoolteachers did not want to renounce their profession, while, on the other hand, there were Christian parents who were not inclined to send their children to the ‘pagan’ school. This is a rare example of the subtle negotiations that took place on the limits of the interactions between Christians and the institutions of the city in which they were living. As we have seen with the use of Romans 12: 15, there were also discussions about the participation in holidays and other public festivals. Tertullian rejects participation in the spectacles of the circus or the hippodrome, as he did in the De spectaculis. He also rejects celebrating in pagan public festivities (Idol. 13–14). Christians may, however, take part in family festivals like marriages and name-giving ceremonies: in this case, even if the feast is tainted by idolatry, the events concerned are good, and participation can be regarded as a normal social duty (Idol. 16). Here again the negotiation of the limits of interaction is subtle (Stroumsa 1998). Too often Tertullian's forceful expression of his point of view has obscured the glimpses of a wider range of social experience that we can find in his texts. Careful attention to what is implied or rejected, and some reading against the grain, allow the historian to develop a richer and more nuanced picture of the Christian groups at the turn of the second to the third century. We will not be offered such rich glimpses before the turn of the fourth to the fifth century in the works of Augustine. We find very little detail on the organization of the African church in Tertullian. In the Apologeticus, Tertullian offers a description of Christian groups for a pagan

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audience and compares them to voluntary associations (collegia), a familiar feature in any city of the Roman Empire. Like the members of an association, the Christians meet regularly, but for prayers and readings; their common meals are also very different from the drinking parties of the associations; their contributions are made on a voluntary basis and are used for the care of the poor (Apol. 39). This text does not prove that Christian groups constituted associations in order to have a legal status in the Roman Empire (Rebillard 2003: 55–61); the comparison is intended only to make the Christian groups, whose meetings generated all sort of rumours, look familiar to the pagans. Tertullian's works offer no clear indication of the organization of the clergy, and this might be the key to understanding a vexed question associated with the name of Tertullian: his separation from the Catholics, sometimes described as a schism. At some point, Tertullian became an adept of what he calls the ‘New Prophecy’, end p.306

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved the prophetic movement initiated in Asia Minor by Montanus, known as Montanism in the anti-heretical sources. African (Tertullian's?) Montanism was mainly characterized by exceptionally rigorous practices: longer and stricter fasting, a ban on remarriage, longer and harder penance (Trevett 1996). Tertullian is very careful to state that only disciplinary issues are at stake, and that the ‘rule of faith’ is not concerned. However, he expresses rather harshly his dissent from the Christians he calls the ‘Psychici’, or the carnally minded, whom the later tradition calls the Catholics, and goes so far as to say that on account of his acknowledgement and defence of the Paraclete he separated from them (Prax. 1. 7). In the light of the later testimonies of both Jerome (Vir. ill. 53) and Augustine (Haer. 1. 86), it has been a commonplace to state that Tertullian then joined a schismatic group of adherents of the New Prophecy. Nowhere in his writings does Tertullian make a clear allusion to such a schismatic group, and in several passages he continues to refer to all Christians as ‘us’, as opposed to Jews or pagans. Cyprian also claims him as his ‘Master’, a name which he would hardly give to a known schismatic (Powell 1975; Mattei 1990; van der Lof 1991; Rankin 1995). The problem with considering Tertullian a schismatic arises partially from the fact that the category of schism has been applied by later writers (and modern historians) to a period when the relationships between groups within the Church were much more fluid and able to accommodate different schools (van der Lof 1991: 361; Brent 1995: 535–40). The situation is already different by the middle of the third century, as the testimony of Cyprian on the organization of the African church makes clear: by then the bishop had become the indisputable locus of ecclesiastical power.

15.3 Cyprian and the Organization of the African Church in the Third Century Cyprian was bishop of Carthage from 248/9 to his martyrdom in 258. He was born into a well-established family of Carthage and had won renown for his oratorical skills before his conversion to Christianity. From his baptism to his election as bishop, only a few years passed, and some older priests opposed his appointment. It seems that Cyprian was an unusually socially high-standing figure in the Carthaginian clergy, and that this explains the choice made by the plebs (Sage 1975: 95–143). Cyprian's treatises, and especially his letters, are a very rich source on the organization of the African churches, but also more generally on the period, since the 250s are particularly badly documented in our extant sources.

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end p.307

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved At the time when Cyprian was writing, the distinction between the clergy and the laity seems to have been well established: Cyprian sometimes uses the words clerus and plebs for designating two distinct groups of addressees in his letters (Duval 2005). The plebs contributes to the church by its almsgiving, but also by its participation in the election of the bishop. The actual way in which the plebs voted is not known, but its vote was the final, decisive step in the election. The plebs can also be associated, though in a very limited and strictly controlled way, with some judicial decisions of the bishop (Duval 2005). The Letters provide the names of three to six deacons and of six to eight subdeacons for the decade of Cyprian's episcopate. It is therefore likely that the Carthaginian clergy counted the maximum number of seven deacons fixed by Acts 6: 1–6 and the same number of subdeacons. The deacons were the bishop's deputies in the works of assistance and in handling the church finances; the subdeacons were their assistants. Up to twelve Carthaginian presbyters are known in the Letters, not all of them being in charge at the same time. This number can be compared to the forty-six presbyters of Rome at the same period (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6. 43. 11). The main function of the presbyters was to teach the catechumens; it appears that in the absence of the bishop they could act as his deputies for the administration of penance and even the celebration of the eucharist. Six acolytes appear as letter-carriers and distributors of alms: they were the assistants of the presbyters. A reasonable conjecture is that the Carthaginian staff numbered one-eighth of the Roman staff (Clarke 1984: i. 39–44). As the Letters amply document, Cyprian was at the head of all the African churches, but it is difficult to determine if this was the result of his own authority or if this was ex officio as bishop of Carthage (Dunn 2002a). The churches do not seem to have been divided yet into provinces following the administrative divisions: bishops from Africa Proconsularis, but also from Numidia and the Mauretanias, participated in the councils gathered under the authority of Cyprian in Carthage (Duval 2005: 30–4 and 51 ff.). It appears that the custom was to schedule a council once a year with a flexible agenda (Dunn 2003). The bishops were invited to attend, but their participation remained on a voluntary basis out of respect for the principle of local autonomy and independence. The decisions reached at a council, which were published in a letter signed by all the bishops present, sometimes called a synodal letter, were sent around to the other bishops in the hope that they would implement them in their own sees (Dunn 2004a). The principle of local autonomy was combined with a strong commitment to the unity of the Church. The relationships between Cyprian and the other African bishops have been analysed in terms of patronage (Dunn 2003), but our only example of such is Cyprian once sending money to some Numidian bishops in order to help them ransom brethren captured by barbarians (Ep. 62). Cyprian's Letters also attest his relationships with bishops outside Africa. He exchanged letters with bishops from Spain (Ep. 67), Gaul (Ep. 68), Cappadocia end p.308

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved (Ep. 75) and especially Rome (Ep. 9, 20, 27, etc.). Cyprian was trying to enforce at this level of communication the same principles of the independence of the local churches and of the unity of the Church. The baptismal controversy of 254–6 between Cyprian and Stephen, bishop of Rome, is worth considering, even

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briefly, from this point of view (Sage 1975: 295–335). The issue at stake was how to receive converts baptized in schism: Cyprian thought that their baptism was invalid, and that they must be baptized in the true Church, while Stephen accepted the validity of their baptism and thought that it was enough to receive them by the imposition of hands alone. An African council held in Carthage in 256 reached a decision conforming to Cyprian's position. Stephen then reacted by threatening to break communion with all bishops who would rebaptize converts from schism. Cyprian was ready to concede some prominence to the church of Rome, but denied Stephen the right to impose his views on other local churches. Cyprian defended the same position in a letter addressed to two Spanish churches in which he offered support, even though he knew that Stephen took a different stance (Dunn 2002b).

15.4 The Persecutions in North Africa Cyprian is also a major source of information for the persecution of Decius in 249/50 and then the persecution of Valerian in 257/8. Since at least 180 there had been executions of Christians in Africa, but it was not systematic; Christians were denounced by private individuals to the Roman authorities and then executed (Barnes 1968). We have already mentioned the Scillitan Martyrs, and several texts of Tertullian attest such sporadic outbursts of violence (Barnes 1985: 143–63). The most famous case is the martyrdom of Perpetua and her companions, all condemned to death at Carthage in 203. Even the persecution of Decius became a persecution of Christians only because they did not comply with the general call to sacrifice to the gods of the Empire (Rives 1999; Selinger 1994 and 2002). In a letter preserved among Cyprian's, Lucianus, himself imprisoned and expecting to die of hunger rather than by execution, gives the names of seventeen victims in Carthage (Ep. 22). Some Christians fled, as Cyprian himself did; others bought false certificates of sacrifice; others just sacrificed. Even if few Christians died, the edict of Decius caused a major disruption in the Carthaginian church, especially as dissension arose regarding the way to deal with the lapsed (Burns 2002). The persecution of Valerian was of a different nature: the first law (August 257) singled out the high clergy and forbade holding assemblies; the second law (August 258) prescribed immediate execution of bishops, presbyters, and deacons, and execution of all the honestiores who would persevere in remaining Christians end p.309

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved (Selinger 2002: 83 ff.). It was the first explicit persecution of Christianity, even if short-lived. Gallienus issued an edict of tolerance as soon as the news of the death of Valerian was known in 260 (Selinger 2002: 94–5). There were, however, a few martyrs, especially in Africa, where the laws of Valerian had been zealously implemented. Cyprian was beheaded on 14 September, 258, after having been relegated for a year to Curubis, some 60 miles from Carthage. His martyrdom, as well as his two trials, are narrated in the eponymous Acts (Musurillo 1972). Two other African texts document the persecution: the Acts of Montanus and Lucius for Africa Proconsularis and the Acts of Marian and James for Numidia. The period of relative peace for the Christians that followed the edict of Gallienus and lasted some 40 years is unfortunately not documented for Africa.1 At the end of this period, the soldiers Maximilian in 295 and Marcellus in 298 were executed not because they were Christian, but because as Christians they did not submit to military discipline. Even if, as Eusebius mentions, there were some earlier purges in the army, the ‘Great Persecution’ did not start before

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303. The edict of 23 February, 303 ordered churches to be razed to the ground, the scriptures destroyed by fire, and the Christians among the honestiores to be deprived of their liberty. City officials were in charge locally of inventorying the places of worship and the copies of the scriptures; they were also to refer to the governor the members of the clergy who would not comply. This is what happened at Thibiuca in Africa Proconsularis, where the bishop Felix refused to surrender the scriptures and was thus sent to Carthage to be tried (Musurillo 1972). At Abitinae, also in Africa Proconsularis, despite the surrendering of the scriptures by the bishop Fundanus, the officials arrested forty-two people who were celebrating the Sunday liturgy in a private household. The zeal of the local magistrates there can be explained by the presence among the Christians of Dativus, who had been accused of the kidnapping of a young Christian woman who fled her pagan family (Maier 1987; Lepelley 1979: 335–6). The Acts of Gallonius, recently discovered, show that the local authorities at Thimida Regia also arrested a group of Christians who gathered for the Sunday liturgy despite the edict (Chiesa 1996; Lancel 1999; Lepelley 1999). The implementation of the edicts of Diocletian in Africa is also documented by two texts that are major pieces in the dossier concerning the origins of Donatism; they are not hagiographical, but rather authentic local proceedings. The case of Abthugni, a little city 50 miles south-west of Carthage, is known thanks to the later involvement of its bishop, Felix, in the Donatist controversy. According to the proceedings of the trial, when Felix was tried in 313–14 for his participation in the election of Caecilianus to the see of Carthage, the local magistrate in charge of the implementation of the edict of 303 testified as to his own conduct at that time. The issue at stake in 313/14 was whether Felix surrendered any copy of the scriptures himself. It appears that he was in fact absent from Abthugni when the officials came to seize the scriptures, and that the local officials were content with the destruction of a throne and the doors of the church. No further measure end p.310

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved of persecution was taken in the city against any of the Christians. The Christians and their bishop seem to have been on friendly terms with the magistrate, and indeed the Christians themselves, as it is reported, sent people to ask him about the measures he wanted to take to implement the edict of the Emperor (Edwards 1997: 170–80; Lepelley 1984 =; Lepelley 2001: 321–8; Duval 2000). It was also during a later trial (320) involving Donatists and Catholics that the official acts of what was done at Cirta in 303 were produced and thus preserved for us among the Donatist dossier. Although the governor of Numidia was residing in Cirta, the local officials performed the searches and confiscations. It appears that the bishop Paulus did not offer any resistance and handed over most of the objects and goods kept in the church with the help of his clergy. Among them was Silvanus, a subdeacon in 303, who was later elected bishop by the Donatists and whom the Catholics had on trial in 320. The document is precious, as it shows how the ‘persecution’ at a local level was mainly a police matter without any religious zeal being involved (Edwards 1997: 150–69; Lepelley 1981: 391–4; Duval 2000). The attitude of the bishop Paulus, who rather quickly complied with the edicts, was not isolated; some found ways of saving their lives without betraying their faith, like Mensurius, the bishop of Carthage, who handed over heretical writings (Augustine, Breviculus Collationis, 3. 13. 25); but in many places Christians heroically resisted, and some died. When the persecution ended, problems arose, as some Christians denied legitimacy to those whom they called traditores

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(‘surrenderers’). In the 250s Cyprian managed to maintain the unity of the African churches when a similar problem occurred, but these quarrels engendered a schism that lasted for more than a century.

15.5 The Origins of Donatism Our main source for the origins of the schism is the pamphlet written by the ‘Catholic’ bishop Optatus of Milevis, Against the Donatists. It was important to trace the origins of the schism in order to make a claim for legitimacy. Optatus had access to a dossier of original documents, and this dossier, although incomplete, was copied in one manuscript as an appendix to his treatise. With the two proceedings we already mentioned, the dossier includes several letters of Constantine, whose involvement in the beginnings of the schism was decisive. The dossier seems to have been compiled towards the end of his reign. Upon the death of Mensurius, one of his deacons, Caecilianus, was elected without the customary participation of the Numidian primate. One of the bishops who consecrated him, Felix of Abthugni, was accused of being a traditor, and thus the Numidian primate convened a meeting in Carthage to depose Caecilianus and end p.311

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved elect one Majorinus in his place, but Caecilianus did not accept this decision. Thus by 307/8 there were two rival bishops for the see of Carthage. In April 313, the supporters of Majorinus appealed to Constantine, even though he had given his support to Caecilianus after taking control of Africa late in 312. Constantine handed the case over to the bishop of Rome, who gathered a few Italian bishops in a council. In October 313, they acquitted Caecilianus and condemned Donatus, who had by that time replaced Majorinus. It is after his name that the schism was called Donatism. When he saw that this decision did not end the conflict, Constantine gathered a larger council with bishops from all over the West. In Arles in August 314 the council again condemned the Donatists. When they brought new documents establishing their case, the Emperor charged the vicarius of Africa to investigate. Felix of Abthugni was found innocent, and therefore the election of Caecilianus was declared valid. The vicarius of Africa did not conclude his inquiry before February 315, and it took another 16 months, during which time Constantine contemplated the possibility of dealing with the issue in person, before in November 316 he finally ordered the confiscation of the churches belonging to the Donatists and exiled their bishops. Repression followed and lasted until 321, when Constantine recalled all Donatists from exile. He could not appear to persecute Christians, even schismatics, and still present himself as the champion of Christianity against Licinius. The Donatist church prospered quickly, and in 336 Donatus could hold a council in Carthage attended by 270 bishops (Barnes 1981: 54 ff. and 1982: 238 ff.; Birley 1987). I cannot give here a complete, or even brief, outline of the following history of the relations of the two churches in Africa between the end of the reign of Constantine and the Conference of Carthage in 411 (see Frend 1952; Crespin 1965). I will instead give some information on documents that allow the historian direct access to the Donatists.2 Augustine in his anti-Donatist treatises quotes large extracts from the writings of his opponents, but this does not constitute a reliable and unbiased source. This is not the case with a little group of Donatist martyr stories.

15.6 Donatist Martyr Stories

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It is important first to make a clear distinction between texts which record the martyrdom of Donatists and those which record the memory of martyrs from the pagan persecutions and have been in use in the Donatist church.3 Like the Catholics, the Donatists commemorated the martyrs by the reading of their Acts during the liturgy on the day of the anniversary of their martyrdom (de Gaiffier 1954). We thus have evidence of their use of the Acts of Cyprian and the Acts of Crispina, an African woman martyr from the ‘Great Persecution’. In each case, one version in the manuscript tradition contains the distinctive Donatist formula ‘Praise God/Christ’. end p.312

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved The Acts of Saturninus, Dativus, Felix and Companions mentioned above are known to us only in a Donatist version (Dolbeau 2003: 276–7, contra Tilley 1996: 24–5). The case of the Acts of Maxima, Donatilla and Secunda, also executed during the Great Persecution, is more complicated: it is difficult to decide whether the only version we have is a Donatist version modified by the Catholics or a Catholic version modified by the Donatists (Maier 1987: 92–105). Three martyr stories record the memory of Donatist martyrs and have been used in the polemic against the Catholics. The first one is a testimony on the persecution that followed the edict of 316: it mentions a Donatus and an Advocatus in its title, but commemorates in fact the heroic resistance of Donatists expelled from their church (Dolbeau 1992). The other two commemorate martyrs from the ‘days of Macarius’. Macarius is one of the two commissioners sent by the emperor Constans in order to distribute money officially to both churches and thus to encourage their reunification. The commissioners, however, quickly showed their sympathy for the Catholics, and Donatus ordered his bishops to refuse their gifts. Violent incidents marked Macarius's tour of Numidia, where the Donatists were especially well established. On 15 August 346 an imperial decree proclaimed unity between the two churches under Bishop Gratus, the successor of Caecilianus, and then systematic repression started. Donatus and many other leaders of his church were sent into exile, and churches were confiscated all over North Africa (Frend 1952: 177–82; Cecconi 1990; Mastandrea 1991). Even if it did not bring a total collapse, the ‘days of Macarius’ were later to be remembered by the Donatists as an event as important as the ‘Great Persecution’. They considered the victims of the repression as martyrs and commemorated them in martyr stories. The Passion of Maximian and Isaac records how the eponymous heroes tore down the edict imposing unity in Carthage and how they were imprisoned, tortured, and put to death. The Passion of Marculus narrates an episode of Macarius's tour in Numidia. When ten bishops with Marculus at their head met with Macarius at Vegesela, discussions deteriorated, and Marculus was arrested and then executed at Nova Petra (Mastandrea 1995). The Passion says that he was thrown from a cliff by Roman soldiers, while the Catholics asserted that he had jumped himself (for example, Augustine, Contra litteras Petiliani, 2. 20. 46). This group of texts is all the more interesting because they are among the few Donatist texts that have been preserved.4

15.7 The Conference of Carthage in 411 The second document that deserves some attention is the Proceedings of the Conference of Carthage that brought together Donatists and Catholics in 411. Here, too, the historian can hear the Donatist voice unfiltered through Catholic biases. When the end p.313

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved emperor Honorius appointed the count Marcellinus to preside over the conference, the Catholics, thanks to the action of Aurelius, bishop of Carthage, and Augustine, bishop of Hippo, had already obtained that the Donatists be assimilated to heretics and therefore liable to the anti-heretical legislation. It was nevertheless symbolically important to hold a conference in order to force the Donatists to recognize publicly that there was only one Church (Frend 1952: 244–73). What makes the document's historical value exceptional is that the actual verbal content of what the participants said has been preserved. Part of the first session was dedicated to establishing the protocol for recording the minutes of the conference: the words of each speaker were to be recorded in shorthand, transcribed, checked by members of both parties, and finally authenticated and notarized by the speaker himself. Procedural matters in general were widely discussed. It was, however, more than a dilatory tactic adopted by the Donatists. They were thus able, for instance, to demonstrate that they had at least as many representatives as the Catholics. Thanks to the long and painful checking of numbers and identities of bishops of the two sides, we thus have a rather extensive idea of the respective strength of the Catholics and the Donatists in the different provinces of North Africa, with a stronger presence of Donatists in Numidia and of Catholics in Africa Proconsularis (Lancel 1972; Tilley 1991; Shaw 1992). The discussions recorded in the Proceedings also allow us a more nuanced view of their ecclesiology than the one offered by Augustine through the refutation of their arguments, especially regarding the Donatist view of the Catholic Church outside Africa (Eno 1972).

15.8 Interpretations of Donatism A few words must be said about modern interpretations of two related issues: What is ‘African’ about Donatism? And who were the Circumcellions? W. H. C. Frend in his 1952 book The Donatist Church sought to explain Donatism as ‘a movement of protest in Roman North Africa’, and considered Donatism as the true expression of African Christianity. His thorough knowledge of the geography, the ethnology, and the archaeology of North Africa allowed him to emphasize that the cradle of Donatism was the rural Numidia of the Berbers, while the Catholics were stronger in the cities of Africa Proconsularis. Donatists would thus be motivated more by nationalist and social than by religious concerns. The inherent danger in such a search for a local explanation is that it presupposes, rather than demonstrates, continuity in the history of Africa (Brown 1961, 1968; Congar 1963: 25–48). Donatism must be studied both in its local context and in the larger context of late antique Mediterranean Christianity. Donatists represent those Christians in North Africa end p.314

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved who remained committed to a sharp division between the world and the Church (Markus 1990). The Circumcellions are known as Donatism's militant wing. I made a quick allusion to them when I mentioned the violence which accompanied the mission of Paulus and Macarius in 347; this is when they appear for the first time in our sources. Optatus describes how the bishop of Bagai in Numidia, another Donatus, called them in order to harass the imperial commissioners. He also records how these same Circumcellions had terrorized the countryside some years before (Optatus, Against the Donatists, 3. 4). This is what led some scholars to see them

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as social revolutionaries and to understand their association with the Donatists as an opportunity to give a religious dimension to a primarily social movement. It seems implausible, however, to assume too strong a continuity between the members of the peasant revolt of the 340s and the religious activists of the Donatist church still operating in the 410s (Birley 1987: 32–4; Lepelley 1992). To consider them as a religious phenomenon that presents an analogy with phenomena from other parts of the Roman world is very likely a fruitful method, but more work needs to be done on the primary sources.5

15.9 Augustine and the Limits of Christianization of North Africa The name of Augustine has been mentioned with that of Aurelius, the bishop of Carthage from 391/2 to 427. Augustine had been ordained priest of Hippo in 391, and would be elected bishop in 395. The two men worked together to revitalize the Catholic Church of Africa, in particular through the planning of regular councils. It is in Hippo that in 393 the first plenary council of Africa summoned by Aurelius was held. Its decisions formed the basis of the conciliar legislation for the church of Africa, especially in matters of ecclesiastical discipline. To ensure unity before the schismatics, they inaugurated the holding of an annual general council, to which each province would send three legates. Aurelius and Augustine also used this institution to defend their positions vis-à-vis the Roman see. Augustine, though he was only a presbyter, delivered a speech in the presence of all the bishops, ‘On faith and the symbol’, a synthesis of Catholic doctrine, which would establish him as the spokesman of the African church for the next 40 years (Cross 1961; Munier 1968, 2003). It is not possible here to trace the career of Augustine, or to evoke his role as controversialist (Brown 2000; Lancel 2002; O'Donnell 2005). I will instead focus on his sermons, as they shed an unusual light on his daily life as a bishop. New end p.315

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved evidence considerably renewed interest in his preaching, especially when François Dolbeau discovered some twenty-six new sermons in 1990.6 Preaching was the duty and privilege of the bishop.7 The most regular day for preaching was Sunday, but we know that Augustine also preached regularly on Saturday. The liturgical calendar could, however, impose other rhythms: a sermon every day during Lent or a week with several sermons a day for Easter, for instance. Augustine preached in the different churches of Hippo, but he also delivered sermons in many other places. Every time he was in Carthage, Bishop Aurelius invited him to preach, and so did other bishops when he was travelling through the province. His sermons were delivered extemporaneously for the most part, and they are filled with evidence of spontaneity like a conversational tone and irregularities of syntax. Augustine's sermons were recorded by stenographers who took notes in shorthand as they were being delivered and then transcribed them in longhand. Not all the sermons delivered by Augustine were recorded: a likely estimate is that only one out of ten sermons has been preserved. The recorded discourses were then archived in the bishop's library. Augustine never completed the revised edition of his sermons that he was preparing in 428 (Ep. 224.2; Retract. 2. 67. 23), and we thus depend on collections gathered already during his lifetime and after his death in Africa, Italy, and the south of Gaul. During the process of their transmission, many sermons have been truncated by the copyists, who deleted in particular every concrete allusion to the circumstances of preaching (Dolbeau 1996: 521–3). The great value of the collections discovered by F. Dolbeau is that they contain some sermons which

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were known before only in a shortened version. We are thus able now to determine with a reasonable certainty which sermons are ‘complete’. These are the most precious sermons for historians, as they contain a great deal of information about the context of the delivery and the audience. One aspect that these sermons document firsthand are the limits of the Christianization of North Africa in the age of Augustine. A century or so after the conversion of Constantine and after the recent mission of special imperial agents to close pagan shrines in Africa (399), the pagans, especially the educated ones, were still very much present in Augustine's preaching (Chadwick 1998). In a very long sermon preached for the Calends of January 404, he tried to prevent his fellow Christians from being impressed by men who could boast: ‘And am I going to be what my janitress, and not rather what Plato was, or Pythagoras?’ (Serm. Dolbeau 26. 59). Many of these educated pagans were still leading the local municipalities around Hippo (Lepelley 1998). As the letters show, some of these pagan aristocrats were ready to consider Augustine as one of them, regardless of his religion (Rebillard 1998). Historians have pointed out that Augustine was living in a world in which the Christians were very likely a majority, but in which public life, and in particular the administration of the city, remained largely untouched by Christianity (Lepelley 1975: 32–7; 1979: 371–6). The calendar itself was still very much the same, despite the new rhythms imposed on it by the Christian liturgy. If Augustine preached for more end p.316

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved than two hours on the Calends of January 404, it was in part to keep in church those of the Christians who wanted very much to join their neighbours and friends for the festivities of the Calends (Scheid 1998). Even if it was an issue of authority for Augustine to determine what was and was not ‘pagan’ in the religious practices of his flock (Brown 1995: 24), and if, as a consequence, his labels should not be taken at face value, his sermons allow us to picture a society in which the boundaries were not as strictly drawn as the Christian bishop would have liked, a society in which Christians and non-Christians were sharing a lot, a society in which the limits of what was religious were still the object of constant and subtle negotiations.

15.10 The End of Christianity in North Africa? In 430, Augustine died in a city surrounded by the Vandals, who had recently invaded Numidia. One year later Hippo was evacuated and partially burned. Sometime before 436, the Vandal king Gaiseric settled the capital of his newly conquered kingdom there. When he took Carthage in 439, it was the end of Roman Africa. The history of the African churches during the Vandal (429–533) and Byzantine (533–698) period is usually written as one of a long and irremediable decline before the Arab conquest, achieved in 711, put an end to African Christianity. This scheme has undergone a drastic revision thanks to some new and very good scholarship in the last few years.8 The African churches had a long history after the end of Roman Africa, as evinced by Arab sources and even epitaphs of Christians dated to the tenth and eleventh centuries. This newly documented vitality of Christianity as late as the tenth and eleventh centuries, even if relative, invites us to look afresh at the intermediary periods of Vandal and Byzantine Africa and to leave aside the discourse on the decline and end of Christianity which has pervaded most of the bibliography (Handley 2004). Notes 1.

A contemporary of Cyprian, who wrote in Africa if not an African, is Commodianus. His Instructions give some interesting vignettes on the daily life of

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Christians in the third century. 2. For an interesting attempt to read the Donatist texts and a reconstruction of their world, see Tilley (1997). end p.317

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Tilley (1996) provides an English translation of most of the Donatist martyr stories. Her introductory notes on the manuscript tradition and on the different versions of the texts are not always reliable: see Dolbeau (2003: 276–7). 4. Some sixty sermons have recently been attributed to a Donatist bishop preaching between 411 and 429 (Leroy 1994, 1997, 1999; see Schindler 2003). I did not mention the name of the Donatist writer Tyconius (c.330–c.390), as only part of his exegetical works is known (see Tilley 1997: 112 ff.). 5. See recently Caner (2002: 223–35) and Gaddis (2005: 103–30), who both tend, however, to sidestep the previous scholarly debate. Shaw (2004) considers the non-African tradition on the Circumcellions and gives already an idea of ‘who [the Circumcellions] were not’ (p. 258), 6. The Dolbeau sermons have been published from 1990 (see now Dolbeau 1996 and 2005) and an English translation appeared in 1997 (Hill). Brown (2000: 441–81) gives a very thorough analysis of these two sets of texts. See also Chadwick (1996), Madec (1998). 7. On this and the following description of Augustine's preaching, see Rebillard (1999) with references to the texts and bibliography. 8. For the traditional narrative, see Frend (1952), and a vigorous critic of it in Handley (2004). On the Vandals, Courtois (1955) is still fundamental, but see Ben Abed and Duval (2002 and 2003), and Merrils (2004); on the Moors, see Modéran (2003); on African Christians after the Arab conquest, Handley (2004 with bibliography). Suggested Reading The primary sources for North African Christianity are numerous, and the ones listed below are only an attempt to guide the very first steps of readers who want to start working in this field. Dunn (2004b) in the series of The Early Church Fathers is a good introduction to Tertullian and his works. The Letters of Cyprian are available in English translation with the precious commentary of G. W. Clarke (1984–9). Augustine (2001) provides a good selection of letters and sermons of Augustine. A lot of the secondary literature is not available in English, but here are a few titles that can stimulate further the curiosity of the reader. Frend (1952), despite the reservations made in the chapter, gives a good survey of the period. Brown (2000) is much more than a biography of Augustine. Brown (1972) collects several essays on North Africa; so does Shaw (1995). Bibliography

AUGUSTINE (1997), The Works of Saint Augustine, Part III: Sermons, xi: Newly Discovered Sermons, trans. E. Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press).

—— (2001), Political Writings, ed. E. M. Atkins and R. J. Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). BARNES, T. D. (1968), ‘Legislation against the Christians’, JRS 58/1–2: 32–50.

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—— (1981), Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). end p.318

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved —— (1982), The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). —— (1985), Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study, new edn. with corrections and a postscript (Oxford: Oxford University Press). BEN ABED, A., and DUVAL, N. (2002) (eds.), ‘L'Afrique vandale et byzantine’, Antiquité tardive, 10: 21–290. —— (2003) (eds.), ‘L'Afrique vandale et byzantine, 2’, Antiquité tardive, 11: 13–179. BIRLEY , A. R. (1987), ‘Some Notes on the Donatist Schism’, Libyan Studies, 18: 29–41. BRENT, A. (1995), Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century: Communities in Tension before the Emergence of a Monarch-bishop (Leiden: E. J. Brill). BROWN, P. (1961), ‘Religious Dissent in the Later Roman Empire: The Case of North Africa’, History, 46: 83–101. —— (1968), ‘Christianity and Local Culture in Late Roman Africa’, JRS 58: 85–95.

—— (1972), Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (New York: Harper & Row). —— (1995), Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— (2000), Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new edn. with an epilogue (Berkeley: University of California Press). BURNS, J. Patout (2002), Cyprian the Bishop (London: Routledge). CANER, D. (2002), Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press). CECCONI, G. A. (1990), ‘Elemosina e propaganda: un analisi della “Macariana

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persecutio” nel libro III di Ottato di Milevi’, REAug 36: 42–66. CHADWICK, H. (1996), ‘New Sermons of Saint Augustine’, JTS 47: 69–91.

—— (1998), ‘Augustin et les païens’, in Madec (1998), 323–6. CHIESA, P. (1996), ‘Un testo agiografico africano ad Aquileia: gli Acta di Gallonio e dei martiri di Timida Regia’, AnBoll 114: 241–38. CLARKE, G. W. (1984–9), The Letters of St. Cyprian of Carthage, ACW 43, 44, 46, 47 (New York: Newman Press). CONGAR, Y. M. (1963), ‘Introduction générale’, in Augustin, Traités antidonatistes, i (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer), 7–133. COURTOIS, C. (1955), Les Vandales et l'Afrique (Paris: Arts & Métiers).

CRESPIN, R. (1965), Ministère et sainteté: pastorale du clergé et solution de la crise donatiste dans la vie et la doctrine de saint Augustin (Paris: Institut d'études augustiniennes). CROSS, F. L. (1961), ‘History and Fiction in the African Canons’, JTS 12: 227–47.

DOLBEAU, F. (1992), ‘La Passio sancti Donati (BHL 2303 b): une tentative d'édition critique’, in Memoriam sanctorum venerantes: Miscellanea in onore di Monsignor Victor Saxer (Rome: Pontificio Istituto di archeologia cristiana), 251–67.

—— (1996), Vingt-six sermons au peuple d'Afrique (Paris: Institut d'études augustiniennes). —— (2003), ‘La Passion des martyrs d'Abitina: remarques sur l'établissement du texte’, AnBoll 121: 273–96. —— (2005), Augustin et la prédication en Afrique: recherches sur divers sermons authentiques, apocryphes ou anonymes (Paris: L'Institut d'études augustiniennes). DUNN, G. D. (2001), ‘Peter and Paul in Rome: The Perspective of the North African Church’, in Pietro e Paolo: Il loro rapporto con Roma nelle testimonianze antiche: xxix Incontro di studiosi dell'antichità cristiana, Roma 4–6 maggio 2000 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum), 405–13. end p.319

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DUNN, G. D. (2002a), ‘The Carthaginian Synod of 251: Cyprian's Model of Pastoral Ministry’, in I concili della cristianità occidentale secoli III–V: xxx Incontro di studiosi dell' antichità cristiana, Roma 3–5 maggio 2001 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum), 235–57. —— (2002b), ‘Cyprian of Carthage and the Episcopal Synod of Late 254’, REAug 48: 229–47. —— (2003), ‘Cyprian and His Collegae: Patronage and the Episcopal Synod of 252’, Journal of Religious History, 27/1: 1–13. —— (2004a), ‘Censuimus: Cyprian and the Episcopal Synod of 253’, Latomus, 63: 672–88. —— (2004b), Tertullian, ECF (London: Routledge). DUVAL, Y. (2000), Chrétiens d'Afrique à l'aube de la paix constantinienne: les premiers échos de la grande persécution (Paris: Institut d'études augustiniennes).

—— (2005), Les chrétientés d'Occident et leur évêque au IIIe siècle: plebs in ecclesia constituta (Cyprien, Ep. 63) (Paris: Institut d'études augustiniennes).

EDWARDS, M. (1997), Optatus, Against the Donatists (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). ENNABLI, L. (1997), Carthage: une métropole chrétienne du IVe à la fin du VIIe siècle (Paris: CNRS Editions). ENO, R. B. (1972), ‘Some Nuances in the Ecclesiology of the Donatists’, REAug 17: 46–50. FREND, W. H. C. (1952), The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press). GADDIS, M. (2005), There is No Crime for Those who have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press).

GAIFFIER, B. de (1954), ‘La lecture des Actes de martyrs dans la prière liturgique en Occident: à propos du passionnaire hispannique’, AnBoll 73: 134–66.

HANDLEY , M. A. (2004), ‘Disputing the End of African Christianity’, in Merrils (2004), 291–310. HOPKINS, K. (1999), A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Roman Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

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LANCEL, S. (1972), Actes de la Conférence de Carthage en 411 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf). —— (1999), ‘Le proconsul Anullinus et la grande persécution en Afrique en 303–304 ap. J.-C.: nouveaux documents’, CRAI 1999 (3): 1013–22.

—— (2002), Saint Augustine (London: SCM Press). LEPELLEY , C. (1975), ‘Saint Augustin et la cité romano-africaine’, in C. Kannengiesser (ed.), Jean Chrysostome et Augustin: actes du colloque de Chantilly (1974) (Paris: Beauchesne), 13–39. —— (1979), Les cités de l'Afrique romaine au Bas-Empire (Paris: Institut d'études augustiniennes). —— (1981), Les cités de l'Afrique romaine au Bas-Empire, ii: Notices d'histoire municipale (Paris: L'Institut d'études augustiniennes). —— (1984), ‘Chrétiens et païens au temps de la persécution de Dioclétien: le cas d'Abthugnî’, StPatr 15: 226–32. —— (1992), ‘Circumcelliones’, in C. Mayer (ed.), AugLex, i, facs. 5–6 (Basel: Schwabe), 930–6. —— (1998), ‘L'aristocratie lettrée païenne: une menace aux yeux d'Augustin (à propos du sermon Dolbeau 26–Mayence 62)’, in Madec (1998), 327–42. end p.320

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved —— (1999), ‘L'apport d'actes des martyrs nouvellement découverts à la connaissance de la géographie historique de l'Afrique proconsulaire’, Bulletin de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France, 205–21. —— (2001), Aspects de l'Afrique romaine: les cités, la vie rurale, le Christianisme (Bari: Edipuglia). LEROY , F.-J. (1994), ‘Vingt-deux homélies africaines nouvelles attribuables à l'un des anonymes du Chrysostome latin (PLS 4)’, RBén 104: 123–47. —— (1997), ‘L'homélie donatiste ignorée du corpus Escorial (Chrysostomus Latinus, PLS IV, sermon 18)’, RBén 107: 250–62. —— (1999), ‘Les 22 inédits de la catéchèse donatiste de Vienne: une édition provisoire’, RechAug 31: 149–234. MADEC, G. (1998) (ed.), Augustin Prédicateur (395–411): actes du Colloque

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International de Chantilly, 5–7 septembre 1996 (Paris: L'Institut d'études augustiniennes). MAIER, J. L. (1987), Le dossier du donatisme (Berlin: Akademie Verlag).

MARKUS, Robert A. (1990), The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). MASTANDREA, P. (1991), ‘Per la cronologia dei tempora Macariana’, Koinonia, 15: 19–39. —— (1995), ‘Passioni di martiri donatisti (BHL 4473 e 5271), AnBoll 113/N 2: 39–88. MATTEI, P. (1990), ‘Le schisme de Tertullien: essai de mise au point biographique et ecclésiologique’, in J. Granarolo (ed.), Hommage à René Braun, ii: Autour de Tertullien (Paris: Les Belles Lettres), 129–49. MERRILS, A. H. (2004) (ed.), Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa (Aldershot: Ashgate). MODÉRAN, Y. (2003), Les Maures et l'Afrique romaine (IVe –VIIe siècle) (Rome: École française de Rome). MUNIER, C.(1968), ‘Cinq canons inédits du Concile d'Hippone’, Revue de droit canonique, 18: 16–29. —— (2003), ‘L'influence de saint Augustin sur la législation ecclésiastique de son temps’, in P. Fux, J. Roessli, and O. Wermelinger (eds.), Augustinus Afer: Saint Augustin: africanité et universalité: actes du colloque international, Alger-Annaba, 1–7 avril 2001, 2 vols. (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires), i. 109–23.

MUSURILLO, H. (1972), The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press). O'DONNELL, J. J. (2005), Augustine: A New Biography(New York: Ecco).

POWELL, D. (1975), ‘Tertullianists and Cataphrygians’, VC 29: 33–54.

RANKIN, D. I. (1995), Tertullian and the Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). REBILLARD, É. (1998), ‘Augustin et le rituel épistolaire de l'élite sociale et culturelle de son temps: éléments pour une analyse processuelle des relations de l'évêque et de la cité dans l'Antiquité tardive’, in É. Rebillard and C. Sotinel (eds.), L'évêque dans la cité du IV e au V e siècle: image et autorité: actes de la

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—— (1999), ‘Sermones’, in A. Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans), 773–92. —— (2003), Religion et sépulture: l'église, les vivants et les morts dans l'antiquité tardive (Paris: École des hautes études en sciences sociales). RIVES, J. (1999), ‘The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire’, JRS 89: 135–54. end p.321

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved RUGGIERO, F. (1991), Atti dei Martiri scilitani (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei). SAGE, M. M. (1975), Cyprian (Cambridge, Mass.: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation). SCHEID, J. (1998), ‘Les rejouissances des calendes de janvier d'après le sermon Dolbeau 26: nouvelles lumières sur une fête mal connue’, in Madec (1998), 354–65. SCHINDLER, A. (2003), ‘Du nouveau sur les donatistes au temps de saint Augustin?’, in P. Fux, J. Roessli, and O. Wermelinger (eds.), Augustinus Afer: Saint Augustin: africanité et universalité: actes du colloque international, AlgerAnnaba, 1–7 avril 2001, 2 vols. (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires), i. 149–52.

SCHÖLLGEN, G. (1984), Ecclesia sordida?: zur Frage der sozialen Schichtung frühchristlicher Gemeinden am Beispiel Karthagos zur Zeit Tertullians (Münster: Aschendorff). SELINGER, R. (1994), Die Religionspolitik des Kaisers Decius: Anatomie einer Christenverfolgung (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang). —— (2002), The Mid-Third Century Persecutions of Decius and Valerian (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang). SHAW , B. D. (1992), ‘African Christianity: Disputes, Definitions, and Donatists’, in M. R. Greenshields and T. A. Robinson (eds.), Orthodoxy and Heresy in Religious Movements: Discipline and Dissent (Lewiston, NY: Mellen), 4–342. —— (1995), Rulers, Nomads, and Christians in Roman North Africa (Aldershot: Variorum).

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—— (2004), ‘Who were the Circumcellions?’, in Merrils (2004), 227–58. STROUMSA, G. G. (1998), ‘Tertullian on Idolatry and the Limits of Tolerance’, in G. N. Stanton and G. G. Stroumsa (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 173–84.

TELFER, W. (1961), ‘The Origins of Christianity in Africa’, in F. L. Cross (ed.), StPatr 4: 512–17. TILLEY , M. A. (1991), ‘Dilatory Donatists or Procrastinating Catholics: The Trial at the Conference of Carthage’, CH 60/1: 7–19. —— (1996), Donatist Martyr Stories: The Church in Conflict in Roman North Africa (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). —— (1997), The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). TREVETT, C. (1996), Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy (New York: Cambridge University Press). VAN DER LOF, Johan L. (1991), ‘The Plebs of the Psychici: Are the Psychici of De monogamia Fellow-Catholics of Tertullian?’, in Gerard J. M. Bartelink, A. Hilhorst, and C. H. Kneepkens (eds.), Eulogia: mélanges offers à Antoon A. R. Bastiaensen à l'occasion de son soixante-cinquième anniversaire (Steenbrugge: Sint-Pieters

Abdij), 353–63. WHITE, L. M. (1997), The Social Origins of Christian Architecture, ii: Texts and Monuments for the Christian Domus Ecclesiae in its Environment (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press). end p.322

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [323]-[343]

16 The East (1): Greece and Asia Minor Raymond Van Dam Abstract: Greekness and Romanness – Bishops – New Rome but Greek Empire – Paul's Shoes Keywords: Bishop, Christ, Christian, Greek THE apostle Paul was primarily responsible for the initial introduction of Christianity in western, central, and southern Asia Minor and in the Greek peninsula. During the mid-first century his evangelism had taken him from the first communities of Christians in Palestine and Syria as far as the northern frontier regions in the Balkans, ‘from Jerusalem and round about as far as Illyricum’ (Rom 5: 19). Paul's writings were even more influential, in particular the letters addressed collectively or individually to the churches he had helped found in these regions. Eventually his letters were included in the canon of the New Testament, along with the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles. As a result, while the Gospels of course highlighted Jesus' ministry in Palestine, much of the rest of the New Testament represented the concerns of early Christian communities in Asia Minor and Greece. Asia Minor in particular retained its vital importance in eastern Christianity for centuries, producing several of the major theologians of late antiquity. From the fifth century, however, the eastern Roman Empire began to fragment because of theological controversies and pressure on the frontiers. By the seventh century the heartlands of a Christian Greek Roman Empire were Asia Minor and the eastern coastal regions of the Greek peninsula. The scope of Paul's journeys had been a prescient preview of the contours of the medieval Byzantine Empire. end p.323

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Map 16.1 Greece and Asia Minor end p.324

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16.1 Greekness and Romanness Despite Paul's activities, in the early Roman Empire Christian communities were not widespread in Asia Minor, and were even less common in the Greek peninsula. When Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, travelled to Rome in the early second century, he visited a few communities in south central and western Asia Minor. Since at the time there were quite likely fewer than 10,000 Christians in the entire Roman world (Hopkins 1998), these were probably still the only Christian communities in Asia Minor. Two centuries later, Christianity was prominent enough that when the emperor Diocletian initiated persecution of the Christians at Nicomedia in 303, he could watch the destruction of the cathedral, ‘which was visible from the palace’ (Lactantius, Mort. 12. 3). The fundamental ancient narrative of the gradual rise of early Christianity in the eastern provinces is the Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine. Eusebius's History started with Jesus and concluded with the emperor Constantine's establishment of his rule over the eastern provinces in 324. Because he organized the history of early Christianity around distinct themes, and because he cited important documents verbatim, many modern accounts of early Christianity continue to follow his lead. As a result, the greatest challenge for writing the history of early Christianity (and not just in Asia Minor and Greece) is to escape Eusebius's confessional viewpoint. One way of emending Eusebius's perspective is by incorporating additional evidence. For this early period archaeology offers little: there are few material

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remains for early Christianity in Greece and Asia Minor (Frend 1996). In contrast, epigraphy, the study of inscriptions, has been very rewarding. Under Roman rule cities and villages in Greece and Asia Minor were littered with thousands of inscriptions, including records of municipal decisions, lists of honours for local notables, dedications to gods, tombstone epitaphs, and copies of imperial edicts and rescripts. Christians also erected dedications and epitaphs, and almost every epigraphical catalogue includes Christian inscriptions. Over the past century the scholarship on these inscriptions in Asia Minor and Greece has been magnificent. Louis Robert, the greatest epigrapher of the twentieth century, focused on the Greek East, and scholars have edited extensive catalogues for cities and regions (Lane Fox 1987). For enhancing our understanding of early Christianity in Asia Minor the rewards of sorting through these collections can be impressive; the best example is the outstanding synthesis in Mitchell (1993: ii. 37–51). In Asia Minor some rural Christian communities are known only through their inscriptions. In the region south of Iconium the number of inscriptions using Christian formulae and images, and presumably the number of Christians, increased dramatically during the third century. In southern Phrygia one group used the ‘Eumeneian formula’ that left end p.325

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved grave-robbers to God's judgement. In western Phrygia another sect distinguished its dedications with the phrase ‘Christians for Christians’ (Gibson 1978), and by the later third century a majority of people commissioning gravestones from the local workshops professed to be Christians. A second tactic for modifying Eusebius's narrative starts with recognizing his use of rhetorical strategies. Like other authors, Eusebius constructed a narrative of the past that reinforced his own notions of theology and ecclesiastical order, while trying to convince his audience of their correctness. Understanding historical narratives as literary texts that used rhetorical strategies can help reinterpret one of Eusebius's favourite themes, the linear development of orthodoxy. The rugged topography of Asia Minor, especially in the interior, encouraged the appearance of isolated local varieties of Christianity that jostled for recognition and support. Under Roman rule Asia Minor was an innovative laboratory of Christian diversity and a nursery of conflicting theologies, disparate lifestyles, and new institutions. Well into late antiquity heresiologists were stunned at the ‘numerous heresies’ that continued to flourish in the central highlands (Epiphanius, Pan. 47. 1). Too often modern narratives internalize these categories by likewise disparaging such local Christianities as ‘heresies’, outdated or exotic sidelines to the inevitable emergence of an institutionalized Church. The most notorious was the ‘New Prophecy’ of Montanus, who began preaching in the highlands of north-western Phrygia during the later second century. Even though his teachings clearly challenged the emerging ecclesiastical hierarchy of bishops and clerics, Montanist communities were soon widespread throughout central Asia Minor. Different approaches can help illuminate Montanist Christianity. Strobel (1980) focused on topography and the archaeology of various sites; Tabbernee (1997) compiled an excellent collection of Montanist inscriptions; Trevett (1996) closely critiqued and synthesized the largely hostile literary sources. The most promising interpretive approach is by Nasrallah (2003), who evaluates the accusations against this sect as attempts to demarcate proper Christian behaviour and beliefs by imagining the unacceptable behaviour and beliefs of heretical others. Since Montanist Christians were of course engaged in the same process of boundary formation, each variant of Christianity should be defined as a strategy for people to discover individual identities, articulate meaning in ordinary life, and represent both themselves and their communities (King 2003). We can then evaluate these Christianities without

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prejudging the outcome of disputes over the formation of a sanctioned orthodox version. This appreciation of the varieties of early Christianity in Asia Minor suggests a final way of reorienting traditional perspectives. Defining Christianity in terms of meanings and representations, rather than simply religious beliefs and doctrines, allows us to compare it with other strategies of constructing identities in the early Roman Empire, and hence to locate Christianity properly in larger social and cultural trends. Christianity was competing not only with other religious cults; its rivals also included political and cultural formulations of identity. end p.326

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved In Asia Minor and Greece two influential options were available in the early Roman Empire. One was in terms of Romanness. Many cities openly acknowledged Roman rule by founding cults and constructing temples in honour of emperors (Price 1984), while some provincial notables held offices in the imperial administration. Another option for finding an identity was in terms of Greekness. Cities had long been the hallmarks of classical Greek culture, and Roman rule encouraged the public life of cities. Cities were the arenas in which local notables would compete for prestige by holding municipal offices and displaying their generosity. Cities often defined their municipal citizenship in terms of participation in traditional cults and religious festivals. Roman emperors and their administrators hence promoted the beneficial ideology of living in cities. In return, learned Greeks inserted Roman emperors and Roman rule into classical mythology and Greek history, in particular during the renaissance of Greek culture known as the Second Sophistic. During the past decade modern historians have rediscovered the significance of this emphasis on language purism and an association with the classical past for creating ‘a coherent and recognizable identity for the Greek elite at this time’ (Swain 1996: 410). Christianity in Asia Minor and Greece needs to be evaluated in the context of this Second Sophistic. In comparison to the political activities included in Romanness and the cultural and religious aspects included in Greekness, early Christianity was not an attractive option as a form of self-presentation. This concession has two important implications. One is that Christianity, in all its many local varieties, was readily defined as the opposite of the conventional norms and expectations of Romanness and Greekness. This marginalization was most apparent in sporadic outbreaks of hostility. In the early second century the provincial governor Pliny supported those communities in Bithynia and Pontus that were enforcing their religious boundaries by executing Christians. At Smyrna, Bishop Polycarp was martyred in part because he refused to show any respect for the traditional gods or devotion to the Emperor. The citizens of Smyrna labelled him ‘the destroyer of gods’, and Christians in general as ‘atheists’. In the mid-third century the priest Pionius was executed at Smyrna after an imperial edict ordered everyone to sacrifice. The crowd in the marketplace agreed with this punitive assessment of Christians as outsiders: ‘if they do not sacrifice, they are to be punished’ (Musurillo 1972; Robert 1994). The conclusion to be drawn from these examples is not that Christianity already had a significant and growing presence in the Roman society of Asia Minor. Instead, in most cases this hostility toward Christians was simply an incidental by-product of boundary maintenance, attempts by cities to continue to define themselves in terms of Romanness and Greekness. As a result, Christianity seemed fated to remain insignificant in Asia Minor, fragmented into many local sects. The second implication affects how we explain the eventual success of Christianity. As a medium for constructing identities, it could not become more attractive until alternative strategies such as Romanness and Greekness became

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less appealing. The rise of Constantine as a Christian emperor in the early fourth century was end p.327

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved certainly an important factor for assisting the expansion of Christianity, both geographically into more peripheral regions and socially among municipal notables. But Constantine's reign itself coincided with a fundamental transformation of the role and structures of cities in the Greek world. Diocletian and his fellow emperors had increased the size of the imperial administration and the standing army. To finance this larger administration and army, they confiscated some of the revenues of cities. Local Greek notables now faced a dilemma. For centuries they had been proud to serve as municipal magistrates and priests in their home towns and to use their own resources to fund games and monuments. In return, their fellow citizens had commemorated their benefactions in dedications and acclamations. But after the emperors appropriated municipal resources for imperial expenses, the responsibilities of municipal service became a financial burden. From the early fourth century many local notables were looking to avoid municipal offices (Jones 1964: 712–66). Emperors now offered opportunities to evade these obligations. Local aristocrats could make careers by holding offices in the inflated imperial administration; others could become secretaries in the civil ministries. Constantine's inauguration of Constantinople was an invitation for thousands of provincial elites in each generation to become senators in the new capital. Holding high office and acquiring membership in the senate of Constantinople conferred immunity from municipal service. So did service as a bishop or a cleric. As a result, from the fourth century in Asia Minor, most of the known bishops with known backgrounds were local notables who would otherwise have been expected to serve as municipal magistrates and private benefactors (Jones 1964: 920–9; Eck 1978). Both pagan emperors like Diocletian and his colleagues, with their structural changes in the imperial administration, and Christian emperors like Constantine and his successors, with their extension of immunities to bishops and clerics, contributed to the transformation of classical cities into Christian cities (Liebeschuetz 2001). In comparison to both Romanness and Greekness, political and social changes had helped make Christianity more attractive as a strategy of self-representation.

16.2 Bishops During the fourth century bishops assumed increasingly more prominent roles in their cities. In Asia Minor the best-known examples are the famous Cappadocian fathers, whose careers pointedly indicate that ecclesiastical service had now become a viable option for young men from aristocratic families. Basil and his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa were descendants of local notables in Pontus. Their end p.328

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved grandparents had had to go into hiding during the persecutions in the early fourth century; their father was a grammarian at Neocaesarea; they themselves were thoroughly educated in classical culture. After studying at Constantinople and Athens, Basil had devoted himself to theological studies and ecclesiastical

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affairs, and eventually became metropolitan bishop at Caesarea in Cappadocia during the 370s. Gregory served as bishop at Nyssa in Cappadocia for more than 20 years until his death in the mid-390s, and Peter, another brother from this family, served as bishop at Sebasteia (Fedwick 1979, 1981; Rousseau 1994; McLynn 2001; Van Dam 2003b). Gregory of Nazianzus's father had been a municipal magistrate at Nazianzus and a member of a local cult. But once he observed all the bishops who travelled across Asia Minor at the summons of the emperor Constantine to attend the Council of Nicaea, he converted to Christianity and in 329 became bishop of his home town. His son Gregory of Nazianzus studied classical culture abroad at Alexandria and Athens. Even though at first Gregory seems to have preferred a career as a scholar, he soon became a priest, assisting his father at Nazianzus. His brother had meanwhile finessed his education in medicine into a position at the imperial court in Constantinople and then a career in the imperial administration. Gregory himself eventually served for a few months in 381 as bishop of Constantinople. After his return to Cappadocia he served briefly as acting bishop at Nazianzus (Bernardi 1995; McGuckin 2001; Van Dam 2003b). The careers of Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, his cousin Bishop Amphilochius of Iconium, and their heterodox rivals Aetius and Eunomius are uncommonly well documented through their own extensive writings. Even without including the sermons and treatises of John Chrysostom at Constantinople, more than one-quarter of the surviving Greek patristic texts from the fourth century were written by these churchmen from central and eastern Asia Minor. Modern scholarship on the Cappadocian fathers is outstanding. Recent editions of the letters, orations, and autobiographical poems of Gregory of Nazianzus, typically with comprehensive introductions and notes, are available in Sources chrétiennes and the Budé series (Gallay 1964–7; Bernardi 1968; Meehan 1987; Van Dam 1995). Excellent editions of most of the writings of Gregory of Nyssa are available in Gregorii Nysseni Opera; in Sources chrétiennes, the introductions by M. Aubineau to Gregory's On Virginity (Aubineau 1966) and by P. Maraval to Gregory's Life of Macrina and Letters are superb (Maraval 1971, 1990a). Basil of Caesarea has been served less well. The basic edition for most of his homilies is still PG 29, 31. The editions and translations of his letters in the Budé and Loeb series are often unreliable; in contrast, the translation and notes by W.-D. Hauschild (1973–93) and the studies by Gain (1985) and Pouchet (1992) are excellent on the letters. Perhaps the extraordinarily thorough examination of the manuscript traditions by Fedwick (1993–2004) will inspire more new editions. The writings of the Cappadocian fathers and their peers are the basis for all sorts of studies of Christianity in Asia Minor or, more generally, about the development end p.329

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved of theology, spirituality, and monasticism during the fourth century (Meredith 1995). In studies of bishops (for example, most recently, Sterk 2004; Hübner 2005; Rapp 2005) they appear as prominent representatives of larger trends about the rise of monk-bishops and their combination of secular duties and spiritual authority. In fact, the availability of so much information focused on these regions for only a few decades poses several problems of historical interpretation. One concern in evaluating these careers is not to take their prominence for granted. Churchmen had many powerful competitors. Emperors and their court magistrates visited Cappadocia frequently as they journeyed between Constantinople and Antioch. But before Theodosius most eastern emperors did not support Nicene Christianity, and their meetings with local bishops such as

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Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus's father were consistently confrontational (Van Dam 1986). Provincial governors were often more concerned about their reputations at court than with local affairs, and bishops constantly prodded them on behalf of local citizens (Van Dam 2002; Slootjes 2006). Grammarians and rhetoricians retained their prestige as guardians of classical culture (Kaster 1988), while wealthy local landowners might take advantage of food shortages to enhance their own reputations as generous benefactors (Coulie 1985; Daley 1999; Holman 2001). In response, although bishops could appeal to a moral high ground, most did not have adequate resources, either grain or accumulated wealth, to compete with these powerful regional patrons. As long as Roman rule was effective, as long as Greek culture remained attractive, as long as local aristocrats could deploy their wealth in benefactions, bishops struggled to assert their authority. A second interpretive issue is the possibility of generalization. How typical were the careers and experiences of the Cappadocian fathers? During the entire fourth century only a few men actually served as bishops in each city. Unlike the imperial administration, in which provincial governors and other magistrates might serve for only a year or two, bishops had lifetime tenure. Between the death of Constantine in 337 and the accession of Theodosius in 379 only three or four bishops served at Caesarea. At Nazianzus, Gregory's father was bishop for 45 years and was eventually succeeded by a relative. Since particular families might dominate sees for decades, service as a bishop was not a particularly realistic goal (Van Dam 2003a: 53–71). In addition, bishops faced competition from alternative ecclesiastical hierarchies. In some cities, most notably Constantinople and Antioch, there were sometimes two or three rival bishops representing different theological communities; the supporters of the heresiarch Eunomius appointed regional bishops in Asia Minor (Kopecek 1979; Vaggione 2000). Lifetime tenure and competition between rival bishops, furthermore, restricted any smooth expansion of episcopal authority. A final interpretive concern is the impact of Christianity on Greek and Roman society. Even though the transition was gradual, the relentless spread of Christianization was powerfully disruptive in traditional society. One good example is the invention of new legends and new histories. In previous centuries cities in end p.330

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Asia Minor and Greece had promoted foundation stories and traditional rituals that provided links to the famous myths and historical events associated with Greekness and Romanness. Many had claimed gods like Zeus or Hercules or mythological heroes like Jason and the Argonauts as their founders. Other cities would commemorate their ties to conquerors like Alexander the Great or more recent Roman emperors (Harl 1987). Well into the later Roman Empire, Athens prided itself as a citadel of Greek classical culture. Even Jerome stopped to see the famous statue of Athena on the Acropolis. During the fourth century, however, many Greek cities wanted to become part of a Christian history. Gregory of Nyssa claimed that the centurion who had stood at the foot of Jesus' cross later introduced Christianity to Cappadocia. He also described the activities of Gregory Thaumaturgus (‘the Wonder-worker’), a student of the famous theologian Origen, who had returned to convert the region of Pontus and serve as bishop of Neocaesarea in the mid-third century. In this case a legend about a popular saint also conveniently bolstered the prominence of his own family, since one of his grandmothers had memorized the sayings of Gregory Thaumaturgus and passed on the stories to her descendants (Van Dam 1982; Mitchell 1999). Cities also commemorated martyrs, in particular those who

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had suffered during the persecutions under Diocletian and his successors, such as the famous Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia. Heterodox Christian communities likewise invented legends. At Ancyra in the mid-fourth century Montanist Christians commemorated their own martyrs (Mitchell 1982); in the early sixth century Novatianist Christians accounted for their prominence in north-western and central Asia Minor by composing a Life of a local martyr (Foss 1987). During late antiquity the making of so many new Christian histories, for families, cities, and the Church in general, contributed to the loss of many older Greek and Roman traditions, legends, and shrines (Van Dam 2003a: 72–97). This new sense of history was also apparent in the building of churches. Many were overt commentaries on the rise of a Christian society. At Ephesus a market basilica was rebuilt as a large church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and a huge church dedicated to St John overshadowed a relic of the past, the famous temple of Artemis (Foss 1979; Karwiese 1995). At Athens a new church was constructed in the courtyard of the library of Hadrian, north of the Acropolis. At about the same time in the mid-fifth century Christians removed the celebrated statue of Athena from the Parthenon (Frantz 1988; Fowden 1990). At Thessalonica the rotunda that had once been intended as the mausoleum of the emperor Galerius, a noted persecutor of Christianity, was converted into a large church in the mid-fifth century. At Aphrodisias at about the same time, the pagan temple of Aphrodite was rebuilt into a cathedral dedicated to the archangel Michael (Cormack 1990). In Asia Minor and Greece modern scholars can examine the construction of new Christian histories, in literary texts and in monumental shrines, from the rubble of old memories of paganism, persecution, and martyrdom. end p.331

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved After Constantine's reign Christianity became the dominant religion in Asia Minor and Greece, in large part because it now comprised more than beliefs, doctrines, and liturgy. It also offered careers as bishops or clerics, an outlet for local charity, and a sense of tradition and history for cities. These were impressive accomplishments. But to temper any overstatement, we modern historians still need to acknowledge the alternatives to, the limits on, and the outright disruptive impact of Christianity. We need to forget the future and again hold our breath about the outcome of the process. We need to appreciate the ambitions of the emperor Julian, who was certainly not convinced that the reign of his uncle Constantine had changed everything. Julian was a contemporary of the Cappadocian fathers, and had even grown up in Cappadocia. But as emperor he rejected the Christianity of his boyhood. As he travelled through central Asia Minor in 362, he hoped to enhance the effectiveness of Roman rule and the vitality of Greek cities by reviving traditional cults and funding municipal priesthoods. At Ancyra he would have seen the new church, the crowds of poor people in its courtyard waiting to receive daily rations, and the patients in a hospital staffed by monks (Foss 1977). Perhaps as a reaction to these signs of the manifest success of Christians, Julian now encouraged the local priests in Galatia to construct hostels for the assistance of strangers and the poor, and he offered to contribute grain and wine. But precisely at that moment of extravagance Julian seems to have sensed that he could not return to the past, because as a model for their generosity he encouraged these priests to imitate the charity of Christians (Van Dam 2002: 159–80). As a cultural system of identity and meaning, Christianity had now trumped both Romanness and Greekness.

16.3 New Rome but Greek Empire One of Constantine's most durable innovations was the inauguration of

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Constantinople in 330. As a residence for emperors who were concerned about both the Balkans and the eastern frontier, as the centre for many departments of imperial administrators, the foundation of Constantinople suggested the possibility of forming an eastern empire that combined Romanness, Greekness, and Christianity (Dagron 1974). The presence of Constantinople soon became the most important factor in shaping Christianity in the Greek East. Contemporaries already noticed its detrimental impact as it siphoned away the resources of the eastern Mediterranean. Notables from the provinces moved to the new capital to serve in its senate, monuments in the provinces were scavenged for building supplies, and much of the grain from Egypt that had been sent to Rome was now diverted to Constantinople. The excellent studies of Dagron (1984), Mango (1985), and Bassett (2004) have furthermore end p.332

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved shown how this new capital appropriated a suitable history. The importation of numerous statues and celebratory monuments located Constantinople in classical Greek mythology and history and associated it with the foundation legends of Rome itself. Once a small garrison, Constantinople now became a leading Roman and Greek city. It also became a leading ecclesiastical city. The Council that met at Constantinople in 381 pointedly acknowledged the new capital as ‘New Rome’, and designated a ‘seniority of honour’ for its bishop, ‘second only to the bishop of Rome’. The bishops of other great cities in the eastern Mediterranean, in particular Alexandria and Antioch, had to swallow their pride, because this council furthermore limited their authority while leaving the bishops of Constantinople with priority in Asia Minor and much of the Greek peninsula. A canon of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 reaffirmed this priority by bestowing upon the ‘archbishop’ of Constantinople the formal power to consecrate the metropolitan bishops in Thrace and most of Asia Minor. Churches in Asia Minor and the Greek peninsula now had to deal with the influence of Constantinople. One issue was meddling by its bishops, for which the formidable tenure of John Chrysostom in the late fourth and early fifth centuries set the tone (Liebeschuetz 1990; Kelly 1995). A related issue was the seductiveness of the big city, as bishops and clerics often travelled to the capital to attend councils, meet the archbishop and his clerics, and greet the Emperor and his magistrates at court. Just as local notables from the provinces moved to the capital to serve in the senate or imperial ministries, so many provincial churchmen took up permanent residence at or in the vicinity of Constantinople. In the early fifth century, Philostorgius, a native of Cappadocia (Van Dam 2003a), and Sozomen, a native of Palestine, moved to the capital, where each wrote a continuation of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History (Urbainczyk 1997). At about the same time, Hypatius, a native of Phrygia, founded a monastery near Chalcedon (Dagron 1970; Bartelink 1971). Alexander, a native of an Aegean island, first lived as a monk in the borderlands on the eastern frontier before he returned to found a monastery in the middle of Constantinople (Caner 2002). Daniel was born in a village near Samosata on the eastern frontier. In the mid-fifth century he moved to Constantinople and took up residence on top of a column, in imitation of the famous Symeon the Stylite (Lane Fox 1997). Many relics were also imported from the provinces, including the remains of the prophet Samuel, the apostle Andrew, the evangelist Luke, and the missionary Timothy, and the head of John the Baptist. Eventually Constantinople acquired so many relics and shrines that it seemed to have become the capital of a biblical and ecclesiastical holy land, even ‘Second Jerusalem’ (Life of Daniel the Stylite, 10). With the

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support of the resident emperors, the bishops of Constantinople imposed their ecclesiastical leadership by vacuuming up resources, including young men and relics, from the eastern provinces. But not everyone admired the growth of Constantinople as New Rome and New Jerusalem. The most notable characteristic of Christianity in Asia Minor and end p.333

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Greece during the fifth and sixth centuries was the tension between Constantinople and outlying regions and cities. This tension was especially apparent in the great doctrinal controversies over Christology. Just as earlier arguments over orthodoxy and heresy had been disputes over identity and authority, so these new controversies should be interpreted as idioms for articulating the ecclesiastical role of emperors and the relative power of bishops. Through a discourse over Christology, people tried to imagine the contours of a distinctively eastern empire. First, the bishops of Constantinople soon learned the limits of their influence. John Chrysostom was sent into exile, in part because of hostility from Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria, many bishops in Asia Minor, and monks at Constantinople. A generation later, Bishop Cyril of Alexandria engineered the deposition of Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople, ostensibly over disagreements about Christological doctrines. At the Council of Ephesus in 449, Bishop Dioscorus of Alexandria presided over the deposition of Bishop Flavianus of Constantinople. These confrontations split bishops and their communities in Asia Minor. In Cappadocia the bishop of Caesarea, who had supported Cyril, tried to depose the neighbouring bishop of Tyana, who had supported Nestorius (Calvet-Sebasti and Gatier 1989). The Council of Chalcedon in 451 attempted to find a suitable doctrinal accommodation. Predictably, this compromise was itself contested. When the bishop of Side hesitated to sign, a deacon punched him repeatedly in the head (Zacharias of Mytilene, Hist. eccl. 3. 1). Second, both Asia Minor and the Greek peninsula were caught in the doctrinal crossfire. After 451 emperors were typically associated with Chalcedonian theology, and sometimes tried to impose a uniform orthodoxy by proposing accommodation with anti-Chalcedonian (Monophysite) Christians. But some of the loudest opponents of the authority of Constantinople were churchmen from Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Because of their influence, many bishops in central and western Asia Minor, most notably at Ephesus, were likewise often anti-Chalcedonian (Frend 1972). During the sixth century, churchmen were very active in promoting Monophysite doctrines throughout Asia Minor and even at Constantinople. At Tralles the Egyptian bishop John of Hephaestopolis once ordained fifty priests in the upper gallery of a church during the celebration of a Chalcedonian service in the nave below. During the mid-sixth century Jacob Baradaeus was more often on the road than in his see of Edessa, visiting much of Asia Minor and some of the Aegean islands. John of Ephesus, whom Jacob consecrated as bishop, in turn claimed to have transformed seven synagogues into churches and converted 80,000 pagans throughout western and central Asia Minor; he also recorded all these examples (Brooks 1923–5). As a result of these initiatives, more bishops and congregations in Asia Minor adopted the anti-Chalcedonian cause (Honigmann 1951; Métivier 2005). The communities of Asia Minor hence had to choose between an alignment with Constantinople to the north and alignment with centres like Antioch and Alexandria to the south. end p.334

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© Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved The Greek peninsula was likewise caught in the middle. Since the Council of Chalcedon had also evaluated the doctrines of Pope Leo, it highlighted the tension over the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Rome and New Rome. After the Council, the bishops of Rome often objected to attempts by eastern emperors to accommodate anti-Chalcedonian churchmen. In 535 Pope Agapetus tried to assert authority over cities in the Balkan region, including Justiniana Prima, the home town of the emperor Justinian. At the end of the sixth century, Pope Gregory still claimed jurisdiction over several metropolitan sees in Greece (including Corinth and Thessalonica), and even over Crete. The bishops and congregations of the Greek peninsula hence had to choose between alignment with Constantinople to the east and alignment with Rome to the west. A third manifestation of this discourse over the role of Constantinople and the identity of an eastern empire concerned the authority of emperors in these doctrinal controversies, and also in general ecclesiastical affairs. Even though he made some theological concessions to the anti-Chalcedonian position, the emperor Justinian was especially forceful in promoting Chalcedonian unity during his long reign in the mid-sixth century. In particular, Justinian tried to reassert both his imperial authority and the centrality of Constantinople through his patronage for building projects. Outside Myra in Lycia he contributed to the reconstruction of the church of St Nicholas (Šev enko and Šev enko 1984; Foss 1991). At Ephesus he replaced the dilapidated church in honour of St John with an enormous church that included a large enclosed courtyard. This new church was as much a tribute to the Emperor as a memorial to the Evangelist, since inside one fresco depicted the Emperor receiving his crown from the Saint (Foss 1979: 88–94). Justinian's most notable constructions were of course at Constantinople, which he hardly ever left during his long reign. Here his crowning achievement was the great church of Hagia Sophia (‘Holy Wisdom’). With its soaring dome and exquisite decoration, this glorious church was such an architectural masterpiece that it seemed to symbolize the uncontested eminence of Constantinople. In reality, however, doctrinal disputes had alienated many regions of the eastern empire from the emperors and their courts. In the perspective of dissident churchmen, New Rome was still just an upstart see well into the sixth century. Modern scholarship has been inadequate in investigating these dynamics of ecclesiastical life in Asia Minor and the Greek peninsula. Because theological controversies dominated church history after the Council of Chalcedon, modern studies tend to focus on Constantinople at the centre, as well as Rome, Syria, and Egypt. We need more new research on the local varieties of Christianity in Asia Minor and Greece during the fifth and sixth centuries. The archaeology of various cities can be one important source. The volumes in Tabula Imperii Byzantini provide encyclopaedic coverage of regions in Greece and Asia Minor; the best synthetic studies are by Foss (1990, 1996). Literary sources are scattered, and there is regrettably no narrative equivalent to Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History or concentration end p.335

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved of prominent bishops like the Cappadocian fathers. But one of the intriguing characteristics of the stray surviving texts about local communities is their apparent lack of interest in the grand theological controversies. Theodore of Sykeon, a bishop in Galatia, visited Constantinople and Jerusalem several times before his death in 613; but according to his Life, he seemed blissfully unaware of current doctrinal disputes (Festugière 1970; Mitchell 1993: ii. 122–50). Just as scholars should correlate the rise of early Christianity with structural

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changes in classical cities, likewise they need to investigate the impact of pressure on the frontiers in resolving these tensions about the prominence of Constantinople and the authority of Christian emperors in ecclesiastical affairs. In the East, invasions by Persian armies threatened cities in eastern, central, and even western Asia Minor. By defending the eastern frontier in the early seventh century, the emperor Heraclius also extended the influence of imperial Christianity, and anti-Chalcedonian Christianity seems to have lost much of its appeal in Asia Minor. On the northern frontier the Slavs and Avars were infiltrating the Balkans and the Greek peninsula, even as far south as the Peloponnese. Only divine assistance protected some cities. According to tradition, Thessalonica owed its defence to its patron St Demetrius, ‘who rode a white horse and wore a white cloak. Everyone recognized him as the commander of a heavenly army’ (Lemerle 1981; Skedros 1999). By the beginning of the seventh century, the settlements of the Slavs and Avars had diminished the influence of the popes in the Balkans. Constantinople was now the uncontested capital, political and ecclesiastical, of the cities in Asia Minor and Greece still under Roman control.

16.4 Paul's Shoes After his journeys throughout the Greek world, the apostle Paul had sailed off into the sunset, where tradition claimed he was martyred in Rome. Over the centuries he was known primarily as a western saint, associated in particular with the prestige of the popes. In the Greek world, in contrast, there were few memorials of Paul's significance as an early evangelist. At Seleucia, in Isauria, a beautiful shrine commemorated Thecla, a young girl whom legends had turned into Paul's disciple (Dagron 1978; Davis 2001). But Paul himself was largely forgotten. When the pilgrim Egeria stopped at this shrine in the early 380s, she wanted to read only about St Thecla. Having just visited the Holy Land in Palestine, she discovered no comparable holy land of pilgrimage shrines that commemorated the footsteps of Paul in the Greek world. In the early fifth century, a marble box was unearthed at Paul's home-town of Tarsus. This box contained the shoes ‘in which Paul had walked as he preached the word of God’ (Silverstein and Hilhorst 1997: 68). Paul's journeys had in fact end p.336

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved been unexpectedly successful, and under Roman rule Asia Minor and Greece had become strongholds of Christianity. But modern scholars should ponder why, over the centuries, communities did not claim Paul as a founder or patron saint. As an evangelist who was also a Roman citizen and a Greek intellectual, Paul would have been a natural model for later Christians in Asia Minor and Greece who were still trying to incorporate Romanness and Greekness into a Christian eastern empire. Suggested Reading For the history of Christianity in Greece and Asia Minor before Constantine, the most important source is Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, available in several English translations. His narrative can be supplemented with more or less contemporary texts, such as the letters of Pliny and accounts of martyrdoms, and various retrospective accounts, such as Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus. The voluminous writings of the three Cappadocian fathers dominate the fourth century. NPNF has assigned a volume each to Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus; other English translations of various treatises

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are available in ACW, FC, and LCL. The French translations in SC and Budé and the German translations in Bibliothek der griechischen Literatur include excellent introductions and are typically well annotated. For Constantinople in the late fourth century the extensive writings of John Chrysostom are essential. Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus wrote continuations of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History into the early fifth century. Thereafter the literary sources are sporadic. They include the letters of Bishop Firmus of Caesarea in the first half of the fifth century, the Acts of the ecumenical councils, the imperial laws collected in the Justinian Code, and the Novels, the new edicts, of the emperor Justinian. The Lives of various saints, including Hypatius at Chalcedon, Alexander and Daniel at Constantinople (Dawes and Baynes 1948), Athenogenes at Pedachthoe (Maraval 1990b), Theodore at Sykeon, and the Monophysite heroes memorialized by John of Ephesus, are especially useful as regional narratives. Ecclesiastical history needs to be better integrated with scholarship on Greek and Roman society. Outstanding examples of such a more comprehensive perspective include Mitchell (1993), on Christianity in central Asia Minor, and Dagron (1974), on the impact of Constantinople. Van Dam (2002, 2003a, b) uses the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers and their peers to discuss not only the place of Roman rule and Greek culture in a newly Christian society, but also the personal dynamics of families and friendships. Jones (1964) remains themost important andmost durable overview of the administration and institutions of the later Roman Empire, including the Church. Bibliography

Tabula Imperii Byzantini = volumes in Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klass, Denkschriften (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften): end p.337

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Vol. 1: J. KODER and F. HILD , Hellas und Thessalia, Bd. 125 (1976). Vol. 2: F. HILD and M. RESTLE , Kappadokien (Kappadokia, Charsianon, Sebasteia und Lykandos), Bd. 149 (1981). Vol. 3: P. SOUSTAL , Nikopolis und Kephallenia, Bd. 150 (1981). Vol. 4: K. BELKE , Galatien und Lykaonien, Bd. 172 (1984). Vol. 5: F. HILD and H. Hellenkemper, Kilikien und Isaurien, 2 vols., Bd. 215 (1990). Vol. 6. P. SOUSTAL , Thrakien (Thrake, Rodope und Haimimontos), Bd. 221 (1991). Vol. 7: K. BELKE and N. MERSICH , Phrygien und Pisidien, Bd. 211 (1990). Vol. 8: H. HELLENKEMPER and F. HILD , Lydien und Pamphylien, Bd. 320 (2004). Vol. 9: K. BELKE , Paphlagonien und Honorias, Bd. 249 (1996). AUBINEAU, M. (1966) (ed. and trans.), Grégoire de Nysse: Traité de la virginité, SC

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119 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf). BARTELINK, G. J. M. (1971) (ed. and trans.), Callinicos: Vie d'Hypatios, SC 177 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf). BASSETT, S. (2004), The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). BERNARDI, J. (1968), La prédication des Pères Cappadociens: le prédicateur et son auditoire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). —— (1995), Saint Grégoire de Nazianze: le théologien et son temps (330–390) (Paris: Éditions du Cerf). BROOKS, E. W. (1923–25) (ed. and trans.), John of Ephesus: Lives of the Eastern Saints, PO 17. 1, 18. 4, 19. 2 (Paris: Firmin-Didot). CALVET-SEBASTI, M.-A., and GATIER, P.-L. (1989) (ed. and trans.), Firmus de Césarée: Lettres, SC 350 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf). CANER, D. (2002), Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 33 (Berkeley: University of California Press). CORMACK, R. (1990), ‘Byzantine Aprodisias: Changing the Symbolic Map of a City’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 216 NS 36: 26–41.

COULIE, B. (1985), Les richesses dans l'oeuvre de Saint Grégoire de Nazianze: étude littéraire et historique, Publications de l'Institut orientaliste de Louvain, 32 (Louvain: Peeters). DAGRON, G. (1970), ‘Les moines et la ville: le monachisme à Constantinople jusqu'au concile de Chalcédoine (451)’, Travaux et Mémoires, 4: 229–76.

—— (1974), Naissance d'une capitale: Constantinople et ses institutions de 330 à 451, Bibliothèque byzantine, Études, 7 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).

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DALEY , B. E. (1999), ‘Building a New City: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy’, JECS 7: 431–61.

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DAVIS, S. J. (2001), The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women's Piety in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). DAWES, E., and BAYNES, N. H. (1948), Three Byzantine Saints: Contemporary Biographies of St Daniel the Stylite, St Theodore of Sykeon and St John the Almsgiver Translated from the Greek (London: Basil Blackwell). end p.338

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved ECK, W. (1978), ‘Der Einflu der konstantinischen Wende auf die Auswahl der Bischöfe im 4. u. 5. Jahrhundert’, Chiron 8: 561–85. FEDWICK, P. J. (1979), The Church and the Charisma of Leadership in Basil of Caesarea (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies). —— (1981) (ed.), Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic: A SixteenHundredth Anniversary Symposium, 2 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies). —— (1993–2004), Bibliotheca Basiliana Universalis: A Study of the Manuscript Tradition of the Works of Basil of Caesarea, 5 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols).

FESTUGIÈRE, A.-J. (1970), Vie de Théodore de Sykéon, 2 vols., Subsidia Hagiographica, 48 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes). FOSS, C. (1977), ‘Late Antique and Byzantine Ankara’, DOP 31: 29–87.

—— (1979), Ephesus After Antiquity: A Late Antique Byzantine and Turkish City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— (1987), ‘St. Autonomus and His Church in Bithynia’, DOP 41: 187–98.

—— (1990), History and Archaeology of Byzantine Asia Minor (Aldershot: Variorum). —— (1991), ‘Cities and Villages of Lycia in the Life of Saint Nicholas of Holy Zion’, Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 36: 303–39. —— (1996), Cities, Fortresses and Villages of Byzantine Asia Minor (Aldershot: Variorum). FOWDEN, G. (1990), ‘The Athenian Agora and the Progress of Christianity’, JRA 3: 494–501.

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FRANTZ, A. (1988), The Athenian Agora: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, xxiv: Late Antiquity: A.D. 267–700 (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens).

FREND, W. H. C. (1972), The Rise of the Monophysite Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— (1996), The Archaeology of Early Christianity: A History (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). GAIN, B. (1985), L'église de Cappadoce au IV e siècle d'après la correspondance de Basile de Césarée (330–379), OrChrAn 225 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientale). GALLAY , P. (1964–7) (ed. and trans.), Saint Grégoire de Nazianze: Lettres, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres). GIBSON, E. (1978), The ‘Christians for Christians’ Inscriptions of Phrygia: Greek Texts, Translation and Commentary, HTS 32 (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press).

HARL, K. (1987), Civic Coins and Civic Politics in the Roman East A.D. 180–275 (Berkeley: University of California Press). HAUSCHILD, W.-D. (1973–93) (trans.), Basilius von Caesarea: Briefe, Bibliothek der griechischen Literatur, 3 vols., Abteilung Patristik 3, 32, 37 (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann). HOLMAN, S. R. (2001), The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia (Oxford: Oxford University Press). HONIGMANN, E. (1951), Evêques et évêchés monophysites d'Asie anterieure au VI e

siècle, CSCO 127, Subsidia 2 (Louvain: L. Durbecq).

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HÜBNER, S. (2005), Der Klerus in der Gesellschaft des spätantiken Kleinasiens, Altertumswissenschaftliches Kolloquium, 15 (Stuttgart: Steiner). JONES, A. H. M. (1964), The Later Roman Empire 284–602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell; Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press). KARWIESE, S. (1995), ‘The Church of Mary and the Temple of Hadrian Olympius’, in H. Koester (ed.), Ephesos: Metropolis of Asia: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Its Archaeology, Religion, and Culture, HTS 41 (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International), 311–19. end p.339

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved KASTER, R. A. (1988), Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press). KELLY , J. N. D. (1995), Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom—Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop (London: Duckworth). KING, K. L. (2003), What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). KOPECEK, T. A. (1979), A History of Neo-Arianism, 2 vols., PMS 8 (Cambridge, Mass.: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation). LANE FOX, R. (1987), Pagans and Christians (New York: Knopf). —— (1997), ‘The Life of Daniel’, in M. J. Edwards and S. Swain (eds.), Portraits: Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 175–225. LEMERLE, P. (1981) (ed.), Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de saint Démétrius et la pénétration des Slaves dans les Balkans, 2 vols. (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). LIEBESCHUETZ, J. H. W. G. (1990), Barbarians and Bishops: Army, Church, and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

—— (2001), Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press). MANGO, C. (1985), Le développement urbain de Constantinople (IV e –VII e siècles), Travaux et Mémoires du Centre de recherche d'histoire et civilisation de Byzance, Collège de France, Monographies, 2 (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard).

MARAVAL, P. (1971) (ed. and trans.), Grégoire de Nysse: Vie de sainte Macrine, SC 178 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf). —— (1990a) (ed. and trans.), Grégoire de Nysse: Lettres, SC 363 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf). —— (1990b) (ed. and trans.), La passion inédite de S. Athénogène de Pédachthoé en Cappadoce, BHG 197b, Subsidia Hagiographica, 75 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes). MCGUCKIN, J. A. (2001), St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press).

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MCLYNN, N. (2001), ‘Gregory Nazianzen's Basil: The Literary Construction of a Christian Friendship’, StPatr 37: 178–93. MEEHAN, D. M. (1987) (trans.), Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: Three Poems, Concerning His Own Affairs, Concerning Himself and the Bishops, Concerning His Own Life, FC 75 (Washington: Catholic University of America Press).

MEREDITH, A. (1995), The Cappadocians (London: Geoffrey Chapman; Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press). MÉTIVIER, S. (2005), La Cappadoce (IV e –VI e siècle): une histoire provinciale de l'empire romain d'Orient, Byzantina Sorbonensia, 22 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne). MITCHELL, S. (1982), ‘The Life of Saint Theodotus of Ancyra’, Anatolian Studies, 32: 93–113. —— (1993), Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1999), ‘The Life and Lives of Gregory Thaumaturgus’, in J. W. Drijvers and J. W. Watt (eds.), Portraits of Spiritual Authority: Religious Power in Early Christianity, Byzantium and the Christian Orient, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, 137 (Leiden: Brill), 99–138. MUSURILLO, H. (1972), The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, OECT (Oxford: Clarendon Press). NASRALLAH, L. S. (2003), ‘An Ecstasy of Folly’: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity, HTS 52 (Cambridge, Mass.: distributed by Harvard University Press).

POUCHET, R. (1992), Basile le Grand et son univers d'amis d'après sa correspondance: une stratégie de communion, Studia Ephemeridis ‘Augustinianum’, 36 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum).

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved PRICE, S. R. F. (1984), Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). RAPP, C. (2005), Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 37 (Berkeley: University of California Press). ROBERT, L. (1994), Le martyre de Pionios prêtre de Smyrne, ed. G. W. Bowersock

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and C. P. Jones (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection). ROUSSEAU, P. (1994), Basil of Caesarea, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 20 (Berkeley: University of California Press). ŠEV ENKO, I., and ŠEV ENKO, N. P. (1984) (eds. and trans.), The Life of Saint Nicholas of Sion, The Archbishop Iakovos Library of Ecclesiastical and Historical Sources, 10 (Brookline, Mass.: Hellenic College Press). SILVERSTEIN, T., and HILHORST, A., (1997), Apocalypse of Paul: A New Critical Edition of Three Long Latin Versions, Cahiers d'Orientalisme, 21 (Geneva: P. Cramer). SKEDROS, J. C. (1999), Saint Demetrios of Thessaloniki: Civic Patron and Divine Protector 4th–7th Centuries CE, HTS 47 (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International). SLOOTJES, D. (2006), The Governor and His Subjects in the Later Roman Empire, Mnemosyne, Supplements, 275 (Leiden: Brill). STERK, A. (2004), Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church: The Monk-Bishop in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

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118–48. —— (2002), Kingdom of Snow: Roman Rule and Greek Culture in Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). —— (2003a), Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). —— (2003b), Families and Friends in Late Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). end p.341

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Map 17.1 Egypt

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end p.342

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Map 17.2 Palestine end p.343

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [344]-[364]

17 The East (2): Egypt and Palestine David Brakke Abstract: Christian Origins and Judaism – Origen and ‘Origenism’ – A Christian Land: Monasticism, Sacred Space, and Christianization – Christology and Empire Keywords: Christ, Christology, Judaism, Christian F EW if any regions in which ancient Christianity thrived capture the modern imagination in the same way as Palestine and Egypt, whose famous cities (Jerusalem and Alexandria) and equally famous desert regions provided the settings for Jesus and his first followers and later for innovative theologians and legendary monks. Rather than attempt a thorough survey of the issues in, and sources for, the histories of Christianity in Egypt and Palestine, this chapter focuses on problems or themes that shape the current study of both these regional varieties of ancient Christianity. Despite the numerous significant differences between Egypt and Palestine and between the courses that Christianity took in them, the churches in these areas shared common features. In both cases, forms of Christianity originated as forms of Judaism, but scholars continue to debate how Christianity emerged from local Judaisms and how Jews and Christians continued to interact throughout the early period. The formidable Origen spent his career and left his mark in both Egypt and Palestine, which were later troubled by disputes over ‘Origenism’. Monasticism took root in both areas, where it contributed in different ways to reconfigurations of sacred space and to processes of Christianization. Finally, although both regional churches initially opposed the Council of Chalcedon of 451, in the end Palestine became Chalcedonian and Egypt emerged as a centre of anti-Chalcedonian theology. end p.344

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17.1 Christian Origins and Judaism The origins of Christianity in Palestine may seem simple enough: it was here that, around 30 CE, the Jews who had followed Jesus of Nazareth first believed that the crucified Jesus had risen from the dead as God's messiah (‘anointed one’). But our earliest account of Christianity's birth comes from Paul, more than 20 years after the event: c. 55 CE he describes for his followers in Corinth a series of appearances of the risen Jesus that began with an appearance to Cephas (Peter?) and concluded with one to Paul himself (1 Cor 15: 3–11). The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, which date to the last three decades of the first century, present contradictory accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus to his followers in Judaea and Galilee (Mt 28: 1–20; Mk 16: 1–8; Lk 24: 1–53; Jn 20: 1–21: 25; Acts 1: 1–11): their reports reflect differences among early Christian groups about which founding figures carried the greatest authority (Peter, Mary Magdalene, the ‘Beloved Disciple’ of the Fourth Gospel). The authors of these works looked back at the early days and at

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Jesus' own ministry from a time when the distance between the believers of Jesus (‘Christians’) and their fellow Jews was much greater than it had been in the preceding decades. Despite these problems, scholars continue to mine the Gospels especially for information about the earliest Christian communities in Palestine and for their relationships and eventual break with other Jewish groups. The Gospel of Matthew is often seen as the product of a Jewish—Christian community in Palestine or Syria engaged in debate with other Jewish groups over how to follow the Torah in the aftermath of the Temple's destruction in 70 CE (Saldarini 1994; Meeks 2002: 127–31). In an influential study, Theissen (1978) sifted through traditions in the Synoptic Gospels, including those associated with the hypothetical sayings source Q, to develop a picture of earliest Palestinian Christianity as centred around wandering charismatics who preached the approaching judgement in imitation of Jesus the Son of Man and were supported by more settled, household-based groups. Because Q, if it existed, likely originated before 70, it is a crucial source for reconstructing earliest Christianity in Palestine, but scholars debate intensely what they learn from it. Some find in its eschatological orientation and emphasis on Jesus as Son of Man evidence that the early Christians resembled other Palestinian Jews who looked forward to an imminent and dramatic intervention by God and the establishment of a new ‘kingdom of God’ (‘apocalyptic eschatology’); but other scholars claim to be able to discern earlier strata in Q that indicate an originally non-apocalyptic movement, which focused on Jesus as a manifestation of God's Wisdom (Mack 1993; Tuckett 1992, 1996). This debate centres in large part on the extent of Hellenized urbanism in first-century Galilee and its effects on Jesus and his followers (Batey 1991; Chancey 2002). end p.345

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved The Gospel of John, if it originated in Palestine, as many scholars believe, appears to present a clear and compelling picture of one Christian community's origination in and separation from a Jewish community. Anachronistic references to followers of Jesus being ‘expelled from the synagogue’ (Jn 9: 22; 16: 2) have suggested that a story like that of the blind man in chapter 9, although it purports to relate an incident from the ministry of Jesus, in fact shows that early acclamations of Jesus as a miracle worker and prophet became increasingly radical (Jesus is ‘equal to God’; Jn 5: 18) as Jewish leaders pressured their followers to choose between their teaching of Torah (‘Moses’) or adherence to Jesus. Such conflicts in the emerging (not yet normative) synagogues of Palestine led to breaks between believers in Jesus and other Jews (Martyn 2003; Meeks 2002: 91–105, 116–23). Although few scholars now believe that the so-called benediction against the heretics can be used to support a scenario in which ‘the synagogue’ expelled the Christians in the last decade of the first century, the general case that the Johannine community broke with a Jewish group has been widely accepted (see D. M. Smith in Martyn 2003: 20–2). Boyarin (2002, 2004) challenges parts of this theory and uses John's understanding of Jesus in terms of Word and Wisdom to argue against any definitive separation between ‘Christians’ and ‘Jews’ before the fourth century. In general, how theological motifs and social indicators in our sources should affect our picture of emerging Judaism and Christianity in Palestine and other regions remains an important area for scholarly investigation (Wilson 1995). Our knowledge of Christianity in Palestine through the end of the second century remains sketchy (Wilken 1992: 84–5). Eusebius reports that during the First Jewish Revolt (66–70) Christians in Jerusalem fled to Pella on the eastern side of the Jordan (Hist. eccl. 3. 5. 3; Wehnert 1991; Murphy-O'Connor 1995). At the end of the Bar Kochba Revolt in 135, Hadrian levelled Jerusalem, expelled Jews

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from it, and founded a new city, Aelia Capitolina. Christians, especially Jewish ones, must have been affected by these events, but they were, of course, not confined to Jerusalem. When controversy broke out toward the end of the second century over the date of Easter, the bishop of Caesarea Maritima, Palestine's leading city in the post-70 era (Levine 1975), presided along with his colleague from Aelia Capitolina over a synod on this question (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5. 23. 3). Otherwise, our sources provide little information about Palestinian Christians before Origen's arrival in Caesarea around 234. Origen came to Palestine from Alexandria in Egypt; ancient sources provide little information about the advent of Christianity in this major city. Eusebius claims that Mark was the apostle who first preached in Alexandria (Hist. eccl. 2. 16), but his report has problems, and Eusebius otherwise knows little about the Christian community there before the emergence of Clement of Alexandria (c. 180) (Davis 2004: 2–17). Clement himself tells us nothing about how Christianity came to his city. Walter Bauer, in a landmark book (1971; German original 1934), explained this silence simply: the earliest Christian community in Alexandria was Gnostic in end p.346

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved character, and later proto-orthodox writers like Clement and Eusebius either do not know about these early Gnostic Christians or purposefully fail to mention them. The 1945 discovery in Egypt of the Nag Hammadi codices, which contain many writings that scholars consider Gnostic, appeared to support Bauer's hypothesis. But Roberts (1977) presented scholars with a powerful argument against Bauer's view: Egyptian Christianity's earliest surviving papyri and manuscript fragments do not show a greater proclivity for ‘heterodox’ theology than in other regions, and he instead argued that an interest in divine names (nomina sacra) suggest a connection to Palestinian Judaism. Nearly all scholars now agree that Alexandrian Christianity originated in a mission from Palestinian Jewish Christianity, and that the earliest Christians there may not have differed too much from Alexandrian Jews like Philo (d. 45 CE). Many point to the devastating Roman repression of a Jewish revolt in 115–17, after which evidence for Alexandrian Jewry disappears until the fourth century, as the moment when Christians took on an identity clearly separate from Jews. The anti-Jewish polemics in a work like the Epistle of Barnabas, hypothetically assigned an Alexandrian provenance, and aspects of the thought of the Christian teacher Basilides (c. 130) may have resulted from Christians' effort to differentiate themselves from non-Christian Jews (Dawson 1992: 171–6; Pearson 1986; 2004: 82–99; Layton 1989). Even if one accepts the hypothesis of Jewish origins for Alexandrian Christianity, questions still remain. Was the revolt of 115–17 as decisive a moment as scholars have believed? How did the works of Philo exert their obvious influence on Christians like Clement and Origen? Did they only read his books, or did some Jewish-Christian tradition continue from the first into the second and even third centuries? Even if Bauer was incorrect about a Gnostic origin for Alexandrian Christianity, many of the earliest Alexandrian Christians about whom we have information (Basilides, Theudas, Valentinus) appear to have been learned scholars who had contact with Gnostics or at least with their ideas (if one accepts the existence of Gnostics in antiquity, itself a vexed question) (Layton 1989). How, then, do these Christian philosophers and their study circles fit into a picture of Christianity originating in Judaism? However one imagines the origins of Christianity in Palestine and Egypt in relationship to the Judaisms of those regions, ‘Jewish—Christian relations’ surfaces as a significant issue in the study of both of these areas in later centuries. In Egypt the paucity of evidence for Jewish life after 115–17 makes it

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difficult to contextualize references to Jews in Christian sources (Haas 1997: 91–127). During the fourth century, anti-Jewish rhetoric appears frequently in the writings of Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (bishop 328–73), and sources report that Jews participated in the violent clashes that marred this controversial bishop's tenure (Brakke 2001). Bishop Cyril of Alexandria (bishop 412–44) engages in even more heated polemic against Jews (Wilken 1971), and the church historian Socrates reports that in 415 he led a violent campaign against Jewish synagogues in the city, forcing many Jews to leave (Hist. end p.347

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved eccl. 7. 13). Without much evidence from the Jewish side, scholars vigorously debate whether to understand these Christian attacks on Jews as serving merely rhetorical ends, with ‘Jews’ meaning primarily biblical characters or imagined enemies, or as indicating real interchange between Christians and a revived Jewish community. In Palestine the situation is clearer and more complex. Unlike Alexandria, Palestine provides plenty of evidence for the persistence of a large and lively Jewish community throughout our period, led by an official patriarch (Avi-Yonah 1976; Schwartz 2001). After the Christian scholar Origen moved from Alexandria to Palestinian Caesarea in 234, he refers to his contact with Jewish intellectuals and the knowledge he gained from local Jews in his scholarship and disputes with other Christians. Origen's writings provide scholars with information about real social contact between Jews and Christians in the third century (Bietenhard 1974; De Lange 1976). Origen interacted with Jews from what he perceived as a position of weakness: Christians like him were an oppressed minority, ruled by the Romans and fewer and less respected than the Jews (at least in his context) (Jacobs 2004: 60–7). Conditions changed dramatically in the fourth century, when Constantine converted to Christianity and initiated imperial support for the construction of churches and other buildings at the holy places in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Palestine. Christians now sought to remake Palestine as a Christian Holy Land and so to displace Jews from their ancient land both on the ground and in religious ideology, but Jewish life and institutions remained vibrant (Stemberger 2000). As Christians like Jerome wrote about local Jews, they now did so from positions of power that conflated Christian and imperial interests. Jacobs (2004) uses insights from post-colonial criticism to gain new leverage on the question of whether Christian literature from this period provides accurate representations of relations between Jews and Christians: by taking seriously the power imbalance in the new Christian Empire, Jacobs argues that Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric created a reality that both constrained Palestinian Jews and gave them openings for resistance. Because scholarship on Jews and Christians in late ancient Palestine requires extensive linguistic and archaeological skills, many studies focus primarily on one community or the other. Scholars in Israel have emerged as pioneers in developing a more comprehensive view of religious life in ancient and Byzantine Palestine (Kofsky and Stroumsa 1998).

17.2 Origen and ‘Origenism’ During the ancient period no figure dominates the theology and politics of Christianity in both Egypt and Palestine more than Origen (c. 185–c. 253) (Crouzel 1989; Trigg 1983, 1998). This brilliant Christian scholar set the agenda for theological end p.348

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© Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved discussion and became the focus of bitter conflicts in both regions. Historians typically see Origen as the quintessential Alexandrian, embodying that city's long tradition of scholarship and intellectual creativity. This view is true enough, but perhaps historians of Christianity have not appreciated sufficiently that the bishop of Alexandria expelled Origen from that city, while he received ordination and support (as well as continued criticism) in the Palestinian city of Caesarea Maritima. In its Alexandrian context Origen's career raises questions about the character of institutional Christianity there. Eusebius reports that Bishop Demetrius appointed Origen the head of an official catechetical school, an auxiliary of the episcopate that Eusebius traces back to the middle of the second century. The historicity and character of this catechetical school have been subject to much scholarly discussion in the modern period. Eusebius identifies Pantaenus as the first head of the school, and claims that he was succeeded by Clement and then by Origen (Hist. eccl. 6. 6). Most scholars doubt this scenario: they are uncertain what to say about the shadowy Pantaenus, and most agree that Clement did not head an official school operating under episcopal sanction, but guided small groups of interested Christians as a fully independent teacher. On this view, secondcentury Alexandrian Christianity would have been characterized by a number of Christian study circles representing a variety of theological perspectives and directed by philosophers like Clement, who had to legitimate his teaching activities (Dawson 1992: 219–22; Buell 1999). Although there must have also been communities led by what we would call clergy, a monarchical bishop with city-wide authority did not emerge until Demetrius in the last decades of the century. According to this reconstruction, Demetrius actually established a school with more formal ties to the bishop and appointed Origen as its first leader, in order to secure some episcopal control over Christianity's intellectual life. The clash between Demetrius and Origen, which resulted in Origen leaving the city, reflected not only a dispute over doctrine but also a conflict between two Christian cultures, academic and episcopal, and their values. Some scholars see this tension as never quite resolved in Alexandria's Christian community, surfacing again in the conflict between Bishop Alexander and the presbyterteacher Arius in the early fourth century (Williams 2002; Brakke 1994). Still, many scholars accept only portions or even none of this view of early Christian Alexandria and Origen's place in it. Some scholars continue to think that Clement may have headed a formal Christian school, if not precisely what Eusebius describes (van den Hoek 1997), and others challenge the distinction between academic and episcopal modes of spirituality (Gregg 1989). Clement's position within Alexandrian Christianity and the character of groups like the Gnostics and the Valentinians remain fertile areas of study, which provide the context out of which the remarkable Origen emerged. When he left Alexandria, Origen found an intellectual and spiritual home among the Christians of Caesarea Maritima (Crouzel 1989: 24–33). There, even end p.349

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved as he preached regularly as a presbyter (his many sermons come from this period), Origen established a new school, and that institution, along with Origen's vast library, helped Caesarea to emerge as a major Christian intellectual centre to rival Alexandria. Gregory the Wonder-worker's Address of Thanksgiving to Origen, delivered when Gregory finished his studies under Origen in 238, suggests that Origen's school was not a catechetical school or any other official

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auxiliary of the Church, but an independent competitor for students of all religious stripes in a multicultural city, although Origen's curriculum intended to lead the student to the ultimate truth in Christ (Gregory Thaumaturgus, Panegyric on Origen; Knauber 1968; Crouzel 1970). The career of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–339) represents the Palestinian city and Origen's influence at their height: heir to Origen's thought, as well as his library, Eusebius became a prodigious scholar, influential theologian, and formidable politician (Barnes 1981: 81–188). His Martyrs of Palestine provides crucial information about Christian communities in pre-Nicene Palestine, as does his Onomasticon, which also lists known biblical sites that pre-date Constantine's building programme and marks a significant step toward the conception of Palestine as a Christian Holy Land (Groh 1983). In his own day and ever since, Origen's theology has been controversial. Origen's tendency to float ideas without really committing to them and the incomplete transmission of his works sometimes make it difficult to be precise about what Origen taught, and thus scholars continue to debate, for example, how Origen envisioned the resurrection and whether he taught that the final return of all creatures to God could be followed by another fall (Armantage 1970; Scott 1991). Some of these differences reflect the degree to which scholars are willing to trust the Latin translations of works that do not survive in the original Greek: did translators like Rufinus of Aquileia spin Origen's texts in a more ‘orthodox’ direction (e.g. Rist 1975)? Origen also serves as a flashpoint for discussing the relationship between the Christian gospel and Hellenistic culture, especially Platonism. Construing these two things as essentially different can lead to the charge that Origen was more a Platonist than a Christian or was a—if not the—primary agent of Christianity's ‘Hellenization’. Recent scholarship has worked hard to undermine these rigid categories, and so to place Origen in a more complex intellectual setting in which neither Christianity nor Platonism ever existed in a pure, unmixed form (Lyman 1993: 10–81; Edwards 2002). Such modern debates often echo ancient conflicts over ‘Origenism’, which flared in both Egypt and Palestine. The so-called first Origenist controversy arose in the late fourth century and persisted into the early fifth: its major players included the bishops of Jerusalem and Alexandria as well as prominent ascetics in the monastic communities in and near those cities. Charging that someone taught ‘Origenist’ doctrines such as the pre-existence of souls and a non-physical resurrection became end p.350

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved a way to discredit an opponent and even to have him excommunicated. Clark (1992) stresses both theological and social factors in the controversy's origin and persistence. On the one hand, she shows that persons in the conflict tended to divide based on already formed social ties, suggesting that the conflict had as much to do with competing networks of friendship and patronage as with theological convictions. On the other hand, she argues that, although the precise meaning of ‘Origenism’ shifted over decades of controversy, authors did focus on real disagreements over the status of the physical body, the nature of God's image in humanity, and the relative weight of human free will and God's grace. Still, the motives of many players in the early conflict remain murky, especially those of Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria, who first supported and then opposed so-called Origenist monks in their dispute with so-called anthropomorphite monks (Lazzati 1935; Favale 1958; Clark 1992: 44–58, 105–21). Golitzin (2002, 2003) has tried to uncover the exegetical and spiritual roots of both ‘Origenist’ and ‘anthropomorphite’ views, with important implications for what the conflict reveals about the nature of early monastic spirituality in Egypt and Palestine. In particular, scholars consider the possibility that the teachings of Evagrius Ponticus

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(d. 399) lay behind much of this first controversy, even though his name is not mentioned by anti-Origenists (Clark 1992: 61–84). It seems clear that Evagrius's works did play a role in the second Origenist controversy, which arose among monasteries in Palestine, and culminated in the condemnations of Origen and Evagrius at the Council of Constantinople in 553 (Diekamp 1899; Guillaumont 1962). Correspondence of the sixth-century monastic teachers Barsanuphius and John reveals that Palestinian monks differed on how and even whether the monk could read Evagrius, who had developed the most sophisticated theory of the monastic life in late antiquity, one highly indebted to the thought of Origen (Binns 1994: 201–2). Although several of the early monasteries in Jerusalem and its immediate suburbs had been founded by Christian intellectuals for whom scriptural study and theological inquiry were valued activities (e.g. Jerome, Rufinus, Melania the Elder), the laura monasteries in the nearby desert appear to have been divided from their early years between monks with and without such scholarly proclivities. Precisely why the conflict arose and became as virulent as it did may never be fully known, but it seems likely that a failure of the leadership in the Great Laura resulted in the formation of a group of intellectually inclined monks at the New Laura. Attracted to the theologies of Origen and Evagrius but, even more, simply interested in theological work as such, these monks coalesced into a genuine faction under the intellectual leadership of Nonnus and Leontius of Byzantium. A power struggle ensued, which was resolved by the Council of 553 (Binns 1994: 201–17). Origen was still a prominent name in Palestinian Christianity some three centuries after his death. end p.351

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17.3 A Christian Land: Monasticism, Sacred Space, and Christianization When the emperor Constantine began to direct imperial support toward the Christian churches in the early fourth century, he helped to accelerate a process of remaking the territories of Egypt and Palestine into Christian space. In both of these regions monasticism and pilgrimage played important roles in creating sacred space and in converting worship sites and people from traditional religion to Christianity (‘Christianization’), and similar problems of sources and methodology attend the study of these phenomena. On the other hand, differences in topography and Palestine's unique status as the site of biblical events gave these processes different characters. The sources for and problems in studying monasticism in general are discussed in Chapter 24, but students of Egyptian and Palestinian Christianities will want to attend to the specific ways in which monastic movements emerged and interacted with other forms of Christian life in the two regions (Chitty 1966). The ideology of Egyptian monasticism was shaped by the stark difference between the arable land along the Nile and in the Delta, on the one hand, and the inhospitable desert, on the other. Even though many monks lived in and alongside cities and villages, the stark visual contrast between ‘world’ and ‘desert’ gave monastic groups an aura of distance that bishops and monastic leaders tried hard to bridge. Recent scholarship has undermined any simple scenario that would trace distinct forms of monastic life to individual founders; rather, beginning in the second half of the third century, Christians experimented with a variety of forms of ‘withdrawal’, which evolved, solidified, or disappeared in the centuries that followed (Goehring 1999). It was not clear at first how monastic groups should relate to local episcopally led communities and to the bishop of Alexandria, Egypt's patriarch. Scholars now study how monastic and episcopal authorities

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negotiated their relationships in the fourth and following centuries, a process in which Athanasius played a key role. The situation was complicated by the Melitian Schism, which in part expressed a gap between Alexandria and southern Egypt (Brakke 1995; Martin 1996). The Alexandrian patriarchate established and maintained its authority in the face of monastic challenges and Melitian opposition by presenting itself as ascetic in character and patronizing monastic groups (Davis 2004: 43–84). In Palestine too, monastic life took diverse forms and had no single point of origin. Although numerous monks in Egypt came there from elsewhere, in Palestine ascetic Christians from other regions played a much more significant role in founding monasteries and shaping their characters. Latin-speaking Christians from the West such as Rufinus, Melania, Jerome, and Paula created and led large monastic communities in and around Jerusalem: their extensive literary and political contacts throughout the Mediterranean situated their ascetic endeavours within theological end p.352

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved and ecclesiastical politics from the start (Kelly 1975: 129–40). Starting at the turn of the fifth century, a wave of migration from monastic communities in Egypt brought Egyptian monastic traditions to Gaza and other areas of southern Palestine, which became the centre for the transmission and consolidation of the Apophthegmata Patrum, or Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Regnault 1981; Bitton-Ashkelony and Kofsky 2000). In comparison to the Egyptian scene, the relative proximity to Jerusalem of major monasteries in the desert region between the hills of Judaea and the Dead Sea meant that traffic between ‘desert’ and ‘city’ was constant. And unlike the bishop of Alexandria, the bishop of Jerusalem had in his counterpart in Caesarea a formidable rival to his claims of primacy within his region. The holy city of Jerusalem, its bishop, and the nearby monasteries rose in prominence together and in relationship to one another (Sivan 1990). In both Egypt and Palestine, then, monastic communities helped to create a new sacred topography. In Egypt the desert provided a contrast with ‘the world’, rendering ‘the city’ (whether Alexandria or Panopolis or any other city) morally ambiguous, and generating a myth of ‘the desert’ that granted great moral prestige to the monk and naturalized certain Christian notions of virtue by planting them in the landscape (Goehring 2003). Monastic sources, however, often refer to the Judaean desert in which vast numbers of Palestinian monks lived as ‘the desert of the Holy City’, configuring Jerusalem not as the desert's natural opposite but as its political and spiritual centre (Hirschfeld 1992: 10). These different monastic views of space help to explain the distinct ways in which controversies such as conflicts over Chalcedon proceeded in these two regions, and they must have had a range of effects still awaiting scholarly exploration. Pilgrimage to holy sites in Jerusalem and elsewhere provided Palestinian monasticism with a significant mission and organizing principle, as well as a constant stream of new recruits. Many factors contributed to the rise of holy sites and pilgrimage in Christian piety during the fourth century (Bitton-Ashkelony 2005: 17–29), but Constantine's decision to fund the building of churches at caves associated with the nativity, crucifixion, and ascension of Jesus accelerated the creation of a Christian Holy Land in Palestine, which rapidly drew pilgrims from all over the Christian world (Hunt 1982; Wilken 1992: 101–25; see Chapter 40). Christian sources appear to indicate that already before Constantine's conversion a few Jews and Christians had identified some locations of biblical events and visited them for pious reasons (Wilken 1992: 108–11), although controversy surrounds this point (Taylor 1993; Bitton-Ashkelony 2005: 17–29).

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Yet any such pre-Constantinian holy sites were few in comparison with the numerous foundations of the fourth and fifth centuries. The impact of large-scale pilgrimage on Palestinian Christianity must have been extensive, and provides many areas for further study. In ecclesiastical politics, the stature of Jerusalem's bishop increased dramatically, making him a rival to the bishop of Caesarea Maritima, previously the dominant see in Palestine (Walker 1990: 52–7; Rubin 1996, 1999). Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem (bishop 350–87) end p.353

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved clashed repeatedly with Bishop Acacius of Caesarea and vigorously promoted the special status of Jerusalem, exploiting the emerging cult of the Cross in particular (Drijvers 2004: 35–41, 153–76). Pilgrims brought with them not only their prayers and devotion, but also their money, providing a ready source of income for churches and monasteries alike (Avi-Yonah 1958). The emperor Julian's aborted plan to rebuild the Jewish Temple in the early 360s must have caused Jerusalem's Christians great anxiety, but sources are lacking; scholars debate the authenticity of a newly discovered letter on this topic that purports to be from Cyril himself (Brock 1977; Wainwright 1986; Drijvers 2004: 127–52). Although it could not match the prestige of the Holy Land, Egypt developed its own network of holy places and pilgrimage destinations, rooted in the veneration of martyrs and inclusive of living and deceased monks (Frankfurter 1994, 1998a; Frank 2000; Davis 2001). Christian holy places—and the monks who staffed them and hosted their pilgrims (Hirschfeld 1992: 196–200)—proved to be engines of Christianization, especially by giving a new Christian focus to previously pagan or Jewish sites or by providing a new Christian idiom for traditional religious practices. For example, in southern Palestine, Mamre, associated with Abraham (Gen 13–18), functioned as a regional cult centre whose festival attracted Jews, Christians, and pagans. The evidence for Mamre's multi-religious appeal may be unique, but literary hints as well as evidence of archaeological continuity suggest that, although many of the new holy sites were new discoveries, others had long been revered by Jews or pagans or both. Thus the creation of a Christian Holy Land was not so much the imposition of a foreign topography on a previously ‘secular’ landscape as the creation of a new network of locative piety through the transformation of pre-existing regional cults as well as the foundation of new centres (Kofsky 1998). Scholars increasingly recognize the persistence of traditional religions (‘paganism’) at the local level even in the Christian ‘Holy Land’ (Geiger 1998). An emphasis on the local dimension of late ancient religion characterizes the most recent innovative work on what scholars have called ‘Christianization’ in Egypt and Palestine. Trombley (1993–4) looks at the big picture and tends to treat traditional non-Jewish and non-Christian religion as a single entity (‘Hellenic religion’), co-opted by a single Christianity; it contains authoritative analysis of anti-pagan legislation and studies Christianization in Palestine and Egypt through such major sources as Mark the Deacon's Life of St. Porphyry of Gaza and Eunapius of Sardis's Lives of the Sophists. Frankfurter (1998b), on the other hand, examines local and regional religious practices as settings in which people received, adapted, and transformed larger religious ideologies (‘Hellenism’ and ‘Christianity’) and makes use of anthropological models of cultural interaction and change. Wipszycka (1988) likewise emphasizes the local and uneven character of Christianization. Recent studies of Christianization in Caesarea and Scythopolis in Palestine make use of both literary and archaeological evidence to describe local change (Holum 2003; Tsafrir 2003). Scholars will most likely always need to move back and forth between end p.354

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved comprehensive and local perspectives, but the regional approach gives a better sense of how late ancient religiosity was always regionally distinctive. There continued to be ‘Egyptian’ ways of addressing divine powers, rooted in long habits of mind and specific local concerns, even as those ways increasingly expressed themselves in Christian terms. In both contexts monks played important roles in Christianization and have gained a reputation for violently destroying temples and attacking people. Holy men and monks doubtless both led and participated in violence against non-Christians and their worship sites (Gaddis 2005: 151–250), but scholars point out that Palestinian monks at times participated also in more peaceful religious interaction (Perrone 1998), and that Egyptian monks displayed a range of attitudes toward pagan temples (Brakke 2006: 216–26). In fact, although the violent desecration of non-Christian temples and cult objects is readily documented (Caseau 2001), it is difficult to discern precisely how many pagan worship structures were destroyed or dramatically converted to Christian use; most likely fell into neglect before they were torn down or renovated for new purposes (Hahn et al., in press). The monastic prophet or holy man might violently confront traditional religion, but he could also act as a facilitator of more gradual religious change (Brown 1995; Frankfurter 2000, 2003). The dossier of the monastic archimandrite Shenoute of Atripe (c. 350–465) provides rare firsthand documentation of a monk's often violent campaign against traditional religion in his context (Emmel 2002, in press). Shenoute's writings are so valuable because most studies of holy space, monasticism, and Christianization must rely on hagiographic accounts like Mark the Deacon's Life of St. Porphyry of Gaza (Van Dam 1985; Rubin 1998). Hagiography's penchant for stereotypes and biblical typologies and its didactic purposes pose numerous challenges to the historian who wishes to reconstruct actual events, while it may still serve as a rich source for the values of monks and their admirers (Bagnall 1993: 7–8; Gaddis 2005: 153–60; Brakke 2006: 222–3; Frankfurter 2007: forthcoming).

17.4 Christology and Empire As in all the regions of the eastern Mediterranean, the histories of Christianity in Egypt and Palestine in the fifth and sixth centuries are dominated by the controversies over Christology, and in particular over the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Scholars continue to debate how to understand the theological conflict and to account for the enduring schism that it produced, and the reader should turn to Chapter 43 for a fuller treatment of these issues. Here, however, the salient point is that Palestine and Egypt ended up on opposite sides of the schism over Chalcedon. Although end p.355

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved in the decades after Chalcedon most Palestinian Christians rejected the council, and anti-Chalcedonian groups never disappeared, Palestine eventually accepted Chalcedon. The Egyptian church, in contrast, remained solidly anti-Chalcedonian, despite enduring pockets of support for the council and several Chalcedonian or ‘wobbly’ patriarchs. Few scholars now consider anti-Chalcedonianism to have been primarily a function of emerging ‘nationalist’ sentiments in regions such as Syria and Egypt (Jones 1959), but significant regional differences in the character and history of Christianity must be considered as factors in

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understanding the differing outcomes of the Chalcedonian conflict in Egypt and Palestine (Frend 1972: 66–79). The steadfast rejection of Chalcedon in Egypt appears to have been predictable in terms of theological tradition and monastic solidarity. The Christology of ‘one nature’ that Chalcedon rejected had deep roots in the teachings of the Alexandrian bishops Athanasius and Cyril, which emphasized the dramatic salvific results of the Word of God's incarnation in the flesh (Roldanus 1968; McGuckin 1994; Keating 2004). Cyril's success at wrapping himself in the mantle of Athanasian orthodoxy made him an icon for Egyptian Christians (Wessel 2004). Although advocates of the Chalcedonian Definition argued that their theology was faithful to the thought of both Athanasius and Cyril, Egyptians were not convinced; rather, they saw the Definition as a rejection of their theological heritage and spirituality of divination through contact with the incarnate Word. With a few exceptions, the large and powerful monastic communities, their immense prestige enhanced by the Egyptian myth of the desert, supported the anti-Chalcedonian cause and provided rallying points for Egyptian Christians (Frend 1972: 79–83 and passim). A minority of monks in the Pachomian federation, based primarily at the northern monastery at Canopus, supported Chalcedon and provided an opening for the emperor Justinian to remove their leader and replace him with a pro-Chalcedonian, leading to the federation's dissolution. The resolutely anti-Chalcedonian White Monastery federation led by Shenoute of Atripe consequently replaced the Pachomian koinonia in the imagination of subsequent Coptic Christianity (Goehring 2006). On the other hand, the often bewildering history of the Egyptian church and the frequently divided Alexandrian patriarchate up to the Arab conquest should not be seen simply as the attempt of an external imperial power to force its will on a uniformly resistant Coptic church. Stephen Davis (2004: 85–128) persuasively describes intervention by the imperial pro-Chalcedonian church in Egyptian Christianity as ‘a form of ecclesiastical colonialism’. Borrowing insights from studies of modern colonialism, Davis argues that Coptic resistance to Chalcedonian imperial authority was a ‘multi-faceted process of cultural negotiation’, involving forms of compromise and complicity, and shaping new elite systems and lines of communal identity along ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines. This interpretive approach keeps theological and non-theological dimensions to the conflict in play, and even end p.356

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved ties them more closely together, and it provides a fresh perspective on how Coptic Christians dealt with rival imperial powers such as the Persians and the Muslims when they appeared on the scene. Precisely why the Palestinian church, in contrast, eventually embraced the Chalcedonian position has been less fully explored (Perrone 1980). The immediate reaction to Chalcedon in Palestine was overwhelmingly negative, and the Jerusalem patriarchate suffered the same kinds of exiles, forced candidates, and rival claimants as plagued Alexandria. The patriarch of Jerusalem enjoyed his primacy only after a long period of rivalry with another see, Caesarea (Rubin 1996), and thus did not function as the symbol for an entire region as did his Alexandrian counterpart. Certainly another factor was the enormous imperial investment in the network of holy places—not simply wealth (although that was significant) but also prestige or cultural capital. Funded by imperial patronage and built at imperial initiative, the holy places broadcast the emperor's Christian piety and generosity. (The pro-Chalcedonian Chitty (1966: 114) opined that ‘the power of the Holy Places’ helped Palestinian Christians maintain ‘a sober historical Faith’.) Unlike Egypt, the church in Palestine did not have the same

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theological stake in the conflict. Although pro- and anti-Chalcedonian beliefs were genuinely held and debated, there was no core Palestinian theological tradition embodied in iconic figures (like Cyril of Alexandria in Egypt) that Chalcedon appeared to endanger. Also in contrast to Egypt, at least one highly prestigious monastic leader immediately supported Chalcedon: Euthymius the Great (377–473), who had founded two monastic communities, withdrew to live as a hermit when most of his fellow monks opposed the council. His tomb was venerated after his death, and even posthumously he provided the basis for a tradition of pro-Chalcedonian monasticism in Palestine (Binns 1994: 184–8). Binns (1994: 191–9) argues that Palestinian topography and the resulting character of its monasticism helped to make Palestinian Christianity more receptive to imperial promotion of Chalcedonian beliefs. The rugged cliffs of the Judaean desert did not lend themselves to the tight-knit cenobitic communities found especially in southern Egypt; the more decentralized character of Palestinian monasteries fostered theological diversity and inhibited united opposition to imperial authority. More monks in Palestine came from other regions, bringing with them a variety of theological and liturgical traditions and maintaining personal ties to other Chalcedonian areas. Finally, the tradition of a strong connection between the monastic communities and the Jerusalem patriarchate encouraged the monks to move in a Chalcedonian direction once a Chalcedonian bishop was firmly established there. Although the concept of ‘nationalism’ may not be a fruitful way to understand the fate of the Council of Chalcedon in various regions, attention to the Chalcedonian struggle in terms of imperial interaction with local cultures, as in the case of Jewish—Christian relations discussed earlier, may provide a promising approach end p.357

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved to this period of Christianity in Egypt and Palestine. These regions had experienced different histories of relating to the imperial centre, and thus, despite their shared history, monastic traditions, and initial opposition to Chalcedon, in the end these two venerable and closely connected branches of Christianity took opposing paths. Suggested Reading The primary sources for ancient Christianity in Egypt and Palestine are too numerous to list here, and the student should consult the Instrumenta Studiorum at the end of this book. Still, a good way to access the writings of and bibliography for some of the key figures are the volumes in the series of The Early Church Fathers. Relevant volumes for Egypt and Palestine published thus far include those on Origen (Trigg 1998), Athanasius (Anatolios 2004), Cyril of Alexandria (Russell 2000), Jerome (Rebenich 2002), and Cyril of Jerusalem (Yarnold 2000). Secondary literature on Alexandrian and Egyptian Christianity is abundant, and many of the best works are in English. Griggs (1990) provides a useful survey of church history in Egypt, but Davis (2004), although focused on the Alexandrian patriarchate, is more up to date. For the early period in Alexandria, Dawson (1992) investigates the key issues, and for the third and later centuries in Alexandria and Egypt three works are essential: Bagnall (1993), Haas (1997), and Frankfurter (1998b). Biographies of Origen (Crouzel 1989 and Trigg 1983) provide good entries into Christianity in both Egypt and Palestine. In comparison to Egypt, Palestine is less well served by secondary literature in English, most of which focuses on the holy places, pilgrimage, and monasticism. Heyer (1984) provides an overall survey in German; such is lacking in English, but Wilken (1992) comes close. Other basic works include Barnes (1981) and Stemberger

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(2000). Kofsky and Stroumsa (1998) gathers essays that reflect the new sophisticated study of religious interaction in Palestine, and Drijvers (2004) provides a study of Cyril of Jerusalem that goes beyond the usual focus on liturgy and theology. References

ANATOLIOS, K. (2004), Athanasius (London: Routledge). ARMANTAGE, J. W. (1970), ‘Will the Body Be Raised? Origen and the Origenist Controversies’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University). AVI-YONAH, M. (1958), ‘The Economics of Byzantine Palestine’, Israel Exploration Journal, 8: 39–51. —— (1976), The Jews of Palestine: A Political History from the Bar Kokhba War to the Arab Conquest (New York: Schocken Books). BAGNALL, R. (1993), Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press). BARNES, T. D. (1981), Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). end p.358

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved BATEY , R. A. (1991), Jesus and the Forgotten City: New Light on Sepphoris and the Urban World of Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House).

BAUER, W. (1971), Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). BIETENHARD, H. (1974), Caesarea, Origenes und die Juden (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer). BINNS, J. (1994), Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine, 314–631 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). BITTON-ASHKELONY , B. (2005), Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press).

—— and KOFSKY , A. (2000), ‘Gazan Monasticism in the Fourth—Sixth Centuries: From Anchoritic to Cenobitic’, Proche-Orient Chrétien, 50: 14–62. BOYARIN, D. (2002), ‘The Ioudaioi in John and the Prehistory of “Judaism”,’, in J. C. Anderson, P. Sellew, and C. Setzer (eds.), Pauline Conversations in Context:

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Essays in Honor of Calvin J. Roetzel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 216–39. —— (2004), Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). BRAKKE, D. (1994), ‘Canon Formation and Social Conflict in Fourth-Century Egypt: Athanasius of Alexandria's Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter’, HTR 87: 395–419.

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BROWN, P. (1995), Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). BUELL, D. K. (1999), Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press). CASEAU, B. (2001), ‘Polemein Lithois: La désacralisation des espaces et des objets religieux païens durant l'antiquité tardive’, in M. Kaplan (ed.), Le sacré et son inscription dans l'espace à Byzance et en Occident (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne), 61–123. CHANCEY , M. A. (2002), The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). CHITTY , D. J. (1966), The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire (London: Mowbrays).

CLARK, E. A. (1992), The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press). CROUZEL, H. (1970), ‘L'école d'Origène à Césarée: Postscriptum à une édition de Grégoire le Thaumaturge’, BLE 71: 15–27.

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—— (1989), Origen (San Francisco: Harper & Row). DAVIS, S. J. (2001), The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women's Piety in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (2004), The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and its Leadership in Late An-tiquity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press). end p.359

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved DAWSON, D. (1992), Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press). DE LANGE, N. (1976), Origen and the Jews: Studies in Jewish—Christian Relations in Third-Century Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

DIEKAMP, F. (1899), Die origenistischen Streitgkeiten im sechsten Jarhhundert und das fünfte allgemeine Konzil (Münster: Aschendorff). DRIJVERS, J. W. (2004), Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City (Leiden: E. J. Brill).

EDWARDS, M. J. (2002), Origen against Plato (Aldershot: Ashgate). EMMEL, S. (2002), ‘From the Other Side of the Nile: Shenoute and Panopolis’, in A. Egberts, B. P. Muhs, and J. van der Vliet (eds.), Perspectives on Panopolis: An Egyptian Town from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest; Acts of an International Symposium Held in Leiden on 16, 17, and 18 December 1998 (Leiden: E. J. Brill), 95–113. —— (in press), ‘Shenoute of Atripe and the Christian Destruction of Temples in Egypt: Rhetoric and Reality’, in Hahn et al. (in press). FAVALE, A. (1958), Teolfilo d'Alessandria (345c.–412): Scritti, vita e dottrina (Turin: Societa Editrice Internazionale). FRANK, G. (2000), The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press). FRANKFURTER, D. (1994), ‘The Cult of the Martyrs in Egypt before Constantine: The Evidence of the Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah’, VC 48: 25–47. —— (1998a) (ed.), Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt (Leiden: E. J. Brill). —— (1998b), Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton:

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Princeton University Press). —— (2000), ‘“Things Unbefitting Christians”: Violence and Christianization in Fifth-Century Panopolis’, JECS 8: 273–95. —— (2003), ‘Syncretism and the Holy Man in Late Antique Egypt’, JECS 11: 339–85. —— (2007), ‘Illuminating the Cult of Kothos: The Panegyric on Macarius and Local Religion in Fifth-Century Egypt’, in J. E. Goehring and J. A. Timbie (eds.), The World of Early Egyptian Christianity: Language, Literature, and Social Context; Essays in Honor of David W. Johnson (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press). ——(forthcoming), ‘Hagiography and the Reconstruction of Local Religion in Late Antique Egypt: Memories, Inventions, and Landscapes’, Dutch Review of Church History, 86. FREND, W. H. C. (1972), The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). GADDIS, M. (2005), There is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press).

GEIGER, J. (1998), ‘Aspects of Palestinian Paganism in Late Antiquity’, in Kofsky and Stroumsa (1998), 3–17. GOEHRING, J. E. (1999), Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International).

—— (2003), ‘The Dark Side of Landscape: Ideology and Power in the Christian Myth of the Desert’, JMEMS 33: 437–51. —— (2006), ‘Remembering Abraham of Farshut: History, Hagiography, and the Fate of the Pachomian Tradition’, JECS 14: 1–26. end p.360

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved GOLITZIN, A. (2002), ‘“The Demons Suggest an Illusion of God's Glory in a Form”: Controversy over the Divine Body in Some Late Fourth, Early Fifth Century Monastic Literature’, Studia Monastica, 44: 13–43. —— (2003), ‘The Vision of God and the Form of Glory: More Reflections on the Anthropomorphite Controversy of AD 399’, in J. Behr, A. Louth, and D. Conomos (eds.), Abba: The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West; Festschrift for Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press),

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273–97. GREGG, R. C. (1989), review of Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, JTS NS

40: 247–54.

GRIGGS, C. W. (1990), Early Egyptian Christianity: From its Origins to 451 C.E. (Leiden: E. J. Brill). GROH, D. (1983), ‘The Onomastikon of Eusebius and the Rise of Christian Palestine’, St Patr 18: 23–31. GUILLAUMONT, A. (1962), Les ‘Kephalaia Gnostica' d'Evagre le Pontique et l'histoire de l'Origénisma chez les Grecs et les Syriens (Paris: Éditions du Seuil).

HAAS, C. (1997), Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). HAHN, J., EMMEL, S., and GOTTER, U. (in press) (eds.), From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity (Leiden: E. J. Brill). HEYER, F. (1984), Kirchengeschichte des heiligen Landes (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer). HIRSCHFELD, Y. (1992), The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (New Haven: Yale University Press). HOLUM, K. G. (2003), ‘The Christianizing of Caesarea Paleastinae’, in G. Brands and H.-G. Severin (eds.), Die spätantike Stadt und ihre Christianisierung: Symposion vom 14. bis 16. Februar 2000 in Halle/Saale (Wiesbaden: Reichert), 151–64. HUNT, E. D. (1982), Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312–460 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). JACOBS, A. S. (2004), The Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press).

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KEATING, D. A. (2004), The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press). KELLY , J. N. D. (1975), Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies (London: Duckworth). KNAUBER, A. (1968), ‘Das Anliegen der Schule des Origenes zu Cäsarea’,

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end p.361

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved SCHWARTZ, S. (2001), Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

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—— (1992), The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press). WILLIAMS, R. (2002), Arius: Heresy and Tradition, rev. edn. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans). WILSON, S. G. (1995), Related Strangers: Jews and Christians, 70–170 C.E. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). WIPSZYCKA, E. (1988), ‘La christianisation de l'Égypte aux IVe –VIe siècles’, Aegyptus, 68: 117–65. YARNOLD, E. J. (2000), Cyril of Jerusalem (London: Routledge). end p.363

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Map 18.1 Syria and Mesopotamia end p.364

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (Editor), Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI Hunter, David G. (Editor), Cottrill-Rolfes Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Print ISBN 9780199271566, 2008 pp. [365]-[386]

18 The East (3): Syria and Mesopotamia Lucas Van Rompay Abstract: Scriptural Foundations: Old and New Testament – Syriac Christianity around 200: The Wider Context – Syriac Christianity at the Beginning of the Fourth Century: The Witness of Eusebius of Caesarea – Aphrahat and Ephrem – The Beginnings of Syriac Ascetic Literature – The Early Fifth Century and the Increasing Hellenization of Syriac Christianity – The Fifth-Century Christological Discussions and their Aftermath – A Scattered Legacy and a Divided Tradition: The Sixth Century and Beyond Keywords: Christ, Christianity, New Testament, Tradition, Christian, Foundations IN contrast to other Christian traditions emerging and flourishing in the eastern Mediterranean, Syriac Christianity does not derive its main scriptural texts exclusively from the Greek world. Most notably in the translation of the Syriac Old Testament from the Hebrew Bible, rather than from the Greek Septuagint, Syriac Christianity shows its independent position vis-à-vis Greek Christianity. The question, then, as to whether Syriac Christianity might give us some insights into non-Greek, Semitic, or Jewish forms of early Christianity has often been in the mind of scholars. Whatever the answer to this question may be, in the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, Syriac Christianity, which developed and expanded in close contact with the imperial church, became increasingly influenced by the paradigms of Greek Christianity and thoroughly Hellenized. But in spite of this far-reaching adaptation to Greek modes of theology and praxis, the majority of Syriac Christians in the next period of their history, the sixth and seventh centuries, gradually dissociated themselves from the imperial church and created their own communities in Syria and in Mesopotamia—communities which were doctrinally distinct from Roman and Byzantine Christianity. These independent communities exist to the present day in the Middle East and in the world-wide diaspora of the Middle Eastern Christian churches. Given the position of Syriac Christianity at the intersection of the Semitic and Greek worlds, it is no surprise that questions of linguistic and cultural end p.365

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved transformation of Christian traditions, along with issues of religious identity and community building, have been at the forefront of Syriac studies in recent decades.1 The term ‘Syriac Christianity’ is understood here as Christian culture expressed in Syriac, one of the East-Aramaic languages. Syriac Christianity emerged in northern Mesopotamia, an area of encounter between various peoples and civilizations, in which Aramean settlement began as early as the end of the second millennium BCE. In the first Christian centuries, this area was a buffer

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between the Roman and Parthian Empires. When, in the course of the third century, Rome extended its rule eastward and the Sasanids reorganized and centralized the Persian Empire, Syriac Christians became divided between two empires. From the fourth century onwards, Syriac Christian communities existed in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire (particularly in Mesopotamia Prima and Secunda, Osrhoene, Euphratesia, Syria Prima and Secunda, and Phoenicia Libanesia) as well as in the Persian-Sasanid Empire (mainly in north and central Mesopotamia). While Edessa, the capital of Osrhoene, is often seen as its main centre, the geographical area of Syriac Christianity in its heyday was quite vast, extending from the hinterland of the Hellenized city of Antioch in the west to the political heartland of the Persian Sasanids, around Seleucia-Ctesiphon, in the east. In the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, Syriac coexisted with Greek, which was the dominant language of the imperial church (Millar 1998). Connections with Greek Christianity, therefore, should always be considered in the study of Syriac Christianity; on the other hand, Greek writing authors of the Syrian area—Eusebius of Emesa, John Chrysostom, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and many others—deserve to be studied against their Syriac background. The focus of the present essay will be on the Syriac expression of Christianity in Syria and Mesopotamia up to the sixth century. The origins of Syriac Christianity can be traced back to the second century, when Christians began to use the Aramaic of Edessa as their literary language. The Edessene language itself goes back to an earlier period, as is evidenced by pagan Syriac inscriptions (the earliest dated inscription is from 6 CE), and it continued in a pagan or non-Christian context well into the third century (Drijvers and Healey 1999). But it was Christian use that made the language popular over a wide area and a convenient vehicle for the spread of Christianity wherever there was a substrate of spoken Aramaic.2

18.1 Scriptural Foundations: Old and New Testament The Syriac translation of the Old Testament (commonly known under its later name ‘Peshitta’) and some version of the four Gospels must be among the earliest end p.366

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved products of Syriac literature. In both cases, there is evidence for a secondcentury date. Scholars have long been divided over the question of whether the Old Testament Peshitta, translated from the Hebrew Bible, is of Jewish or Christian origin. In 1999, Michael Weitzman made a very important contribution to this discussion with his posthumously published monograph, The Syriac Version of the Old Testament. He situated the Peshitta translators as a team of Jewish intellectuals, working for a generation or two, in the second half of the second century, perhaps in Edessa (Weitzman 1999). They were non-rabbinic Jews, whose emphasis on prayer over against ritual brought them close to Christianity. They subsequently converted and passed on to Syriac Christianity their newly translated Aramaic Bible, written in a form of the language close to the new literary language of Edessene Christians. While this historical reconstruction leaves a number of questions unanswered, Weitzman's philological groundwork is solid and impressive. It shows beyond a doubt that the translators had an excellent knowledge of Hebrew and were steeped in the Jewish tradition. They may have been Jews moving towards Christianity, as Weitzman would have it, or alternatively, as others have suggested, recent Christian converts from Judaism who stood somewhere between the two faiths (ter Haar Romeny 2005: 29–31).

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Whatever the case may be, the Old Testament Peshitta constitutes a major point of contact, or an avenue of interaction, between (one type of Aramaic-speaking) Judaism and nascent Syriac Christianity. It exemplified and reaffirmed the close connection between Judaism and Syriac Christianity at a time when elsewhere in the ancient world Judaism and Christianity were rapidly and irrevocably parting ways. Syriac Christians in the second century shared with Jews the literary tradition of Aramaic, which in the same period, along with Hebrew, began to be used to redact and transmit rabbinic texts, both in Palestine and in Mesopotamia, including the Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible, i.e. the Targumim. Some of the phraseology characteristic of the Targumim also exists in Syriac,3 both within and outside the Peshitta. Occasionally, such phrases found their way into the language of the liturgy, in which these frozen archaic elements subsisted as silent witnesses to a period of close proximity between Judaism and Syriac Christianity. Apart from language and phraseology, Syriac liturgical tradition has preserved other elements reminiscent of the Jewish past as well. In his 1997 study, Gerard Rouwhorst discussed five features that he considered to be indicative of Syriac Christianity's unique relationship to Judaism: (1) the presence of the b ma, a raised platform on which the liturgy of the Word was performed in the churches of Mesopotamia and North Syria, which has its parallels in synagogue architecture; (2) the preservation of two Old Testament pericopes among the readings of the eucharist, reminiscent of the use in the synagogue; (3) the structure of the earliest eucharistic prayer, which parallels the Birkat ha-mazon; (4) traces of a positive attitude towards the Sabbath, found particularly in the Apostolic Constitutions; (5) end p.367

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved the Syriac Christians' adherence, until the early fourth century, to the celebration of Passover on the night of the 14th of Nisan, in accordance with Jewish practice (Rouwhorst 1997). Most of these features cannot be explained as later borrowings, and must go back to the roots of Syriac Christianity itself. While some of them gradually disappeared and gave way to practices that conformed to mainstream Christianity, others survived. The conclusion must be that the Jewish impact on Syriac Christianity right from the beginning was significant, even if it was only one among several constituent traditions, as we will see. Along with the beginnings of the Syriac Old Testament, the second century also saw the first Syriac translation of the Gospels. There has been much discussion among scholars about the question of whether Syriac Christians first knew the four Gospels separately or harmonized together into a single Gospel known as the Diatessaron, a work that is attributed to Tatian, who describes himself as being ‘born in the land of the Assyrians’.4 Tatian was a disciple of Justin Martyr in Rome, and after Justin's death (between 163 and 167), he returned to the East.5 Regardless of whether the Diatessaron was originally written in Greek or in Syriac (the majority view tends towards Syriac, even though Tatian worked on the basis of the Greek Gospels), the Syriac version enjoyed great popularity well into the fourth and fifth centuries. The Diatessaron has not survived in its original redaction in either Greek or Syriac, and can be only partly reconstructed from quotations in later works. It is clear, however, that Tatian, in selecting, combining, and rewriting passages from the four Gospels, conveyed his message of enkrateia (‘self-control’), which included a negative view of the world and a rejection of humanity's enslavement to food and sexuality.6 Tatian further elaborated these ideas in the Oration to the Greeks, his only work preserved in Greek, and they became widespread in early Syriac Christianity. Some scholars,

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therefore, are inclined to see Tatian as a typical representative of the Syriac Christianity of his day, or even to assume that he played a major role in shaping early Syriac Christianity, with its proclivity towards rigorous asceticism (Hunt 2003: 144–75). We do not know, however, how far Tatian's influence went beyond the popularity of the Diatessaron. He remains an elusive figure, and there is no evidence of any activity by him in the East following his return from Rome. If the Diatessaron, datable to around 170 CE, preceded the earliest version of the four separate Gospels in Syriac known as the ‘Old Syriac’ (or Vetus Syra)—a view that is now prevalent—then the translators of the Old Syriac, perhaps working in the early third century, were certainly influenced by the Diatessaron. In their rather free rendering of the Greek Gospels, they often adopted Tatian's readings. The two incomplete fifth-century manuscripts, known as Curetonianus and Sinaiticus, present slightly divergent texts, indicating the fluidity of the earliest textual tradition, which only after a thorough revision in the fifth century led to the Peshitta, the standard text of the Syriac Gospels and New Testament, much more in line with the Greek text. end p.368

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved There can be no doubt that the Syriac Gospel texts of both the Diatessaron and the Old Syriac derived from Greek. A question then remains as to whether the translators, who were speakers and writers of Aramaic, were also familiar with written or oral accounts of Jesus' message in Aramaic or with some Aramaic phrases from the earliest Palestinian ministry, which they occasionally may have woven into their translation work. This assumption has found enthusiastic defenders for over a century (Joosten 1997). While the suggestion of a written account cannot be substantiated, the case for isolated oral reminiscences is more convincing, even though the evidence is slim and rarely unequivocal.7

18.2 Syriac Christianity around 200: The Wider Context With these few major texts—the Old Testament, the Diatessaron, the four separate Gospels—situated in the late second to third centuries, how do other early Syriac texts fit into this picture?8 The message of enkrateia is illustrated most vividly in the Acts of Judas Thomas (Drijvers 1992). In his preaching to the Indians, Thomas strongly advocates a Christ-like life, renunciation of this world, and abstention from sexual activity (even within marriage), in an attempt to regain the original purity of Paradise prior to the Fall. This rebirth can be achieved through man's free will; Christ's incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection are notably absent from the salvation process. Thomas allegedly died as a martyr in India, and his bones were brought to Edessa, where he was particularly venerated. Most scholars assume that the Acts were originally written in Syriac, even though the preserved Syriac text may represent a later rewriting, and the Greek version may occasionally reflect the original more faithfully. Given the prominent position of Thomas in Edessa, which is evidenced at least from the fourth century onwards, several scholars have suggested that the Acts were written in that city. There is little evidence for this, however, and an origin to the east of Edessa would be equally conceivable. One branch of the textual tradition inserts the charming Hymn of the Pearl, which reveals a quite different religious background and exhibits linguistic features pointing to a type of Aramaic more eastern than Edessene Syriac (Beyer 1991).9 The Acts must have been quite popular in Mesopotamia, as they were adopted by Mani and his followers, which suggests the early third century as the terminus ante quem for their origin.

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Another text associated with Thomas, and in modern scholarship often connected with Edessa, is the Gospel of Thomas, one of the Coptic texts found at Nag Hammadi. The name ‘Judas Thomas’, the dualistic-encratite message of many of end p.369

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved the sayings, the textual links with the Diatessaron, and a number of ‘Aramaisms’ or ‘Syriacisms’ have lent appeal to the hypothesis of a Syriac origin, in Edessa, somewhere in the second century. The evidence, however, is sketchy, without a coherent picture emerging. If, as several scholars believe, the Gospel of Thomas dates from the first half of the second century, then it would be the earliest known representative of Syriac Christianity—without clear links to any of the later texts! A recent attempt to situate the original Gospel of Thomas in late-second-century Edessa, and to uncover the alleged Syriac profile of the Coptic text remains problematic in a number of ways (Perrin 2002). Given the lack of consensus on the date and on the literary and historical contexts, it is uncertain at present to what extent, if at all, the Gospel of Thomas can inform our knowledge of early Syriac Christianity.10 A historical person who definitely belongs to Syriac Christianity around the year 200 is the theologian-philosopher Bardaisan. He lived and worked at the royal court of Edessa—in his day still an autonomous kingdom situated between the Roman and Parthian worlds—and his mere presence there shows how far Christianity had penetrated into the social fabric of the city. Bardaisan presents a picture of Christianity quite different from what the other sources seem to tell us. He is a man of the world, not an ascetic or encratite, and his main interest is in the philosophical questions of his day, which he approaches with the tools of the Greek philosophical tradition. Although he is well informed about Judaism, his primary involvement is with pagan Hellenistic culture, not with Judaism. Should we then posit Bardaisan, rather than Tatian, as the main spokesperson for Edessene Christianity around 200? Here, as in the case of Tatian, we should proceed with great caution. Later generations of Syriac Christians explicitly rejected Bardaisan's heritage, and Ephrem condemned and cursed him as one of the arch-heretics. His many works were not copied by later generations and entirely disappeared, with the exception of the fascinating Book of the Laws of the Countries,11 which assesses the role of nature, fate, and human free will, and was written down by Bardaisan's disciple Philippus. There are thus competing and seemingly conflicting images of early Syriac Christianity: the Jewish Peshitta translators, Tatian the encratite, and Bardaisan the court philosopher. One should add the Marcionites to this list. They certainly had a strong presence in Syria, and most of the other groups responded to them. These various strands originated perhaps independently of one another in different areas and at different times, before a more unified picture of Syriac Christianity emerged. Many of the obvious categories of the later period, such as orthodoxy versus heresy, centre versus periphery, and Judaism versus Christianity cannot be applied to the earlier period without resulting in historical distortions.12 Moreover, such questions as to whether Christianity was brought to northern Mesopotamia from Greek-speaking Antioch or from Jewish Palestine, and to what extent Edessene Christianity retained its Aramaic or Semitic stamp rather than being absorbed by Graeco-Roman culture, cannot be given simple answers. We should also realize that most of the earliest texts have disappeared. The few texts that for specific reasons were incorporated end p.370

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© Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved into the later literary tradition were detached from their original context and given new layers of meaning. For example, such texts as the Odes of Solomon are very hard to imagine in their original context. Some scholars have emphasized the proximity of these hymns to Jewish thanksgiving hymns, such as those known from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and have considered the possibility of an early Palestinian and possibly Jewish-Christian origin. Others have explored the connections of the Odes with second- or third-century Edessene Christianity (Charlesworth 1998; Lattke 1999–2005, with further references).

18.3 Syriac Christianity at the Beginning of the Fourth Century: The Witness of Eusebius of Caesarea It is only around 300 that Syriac Christianity fully emerges on the historical scene. From this time on, there is a historiography complete with events and names of places and persons that are part of the uninterrupted Christian history, which later generations of Syriac Christians recognized as their own. With most of northern Mesopotamia fully integrated within the Roman Empire, Syriac Christianity from this time on developed within the framework of expanding imperial Christianity, the foundations of which were laid by Constantine's conversion and the Council of Nicaea (325). In the early fourth century, the West heard about Christianity in Mesopotamia through Eusebius of Caesarea, who included in his Ecclesiastical History the story of Edessa's conversion to Christianity in the days of King Abgar, a contemporary of Jesus (I, 13). The text of Abgar's letter to Jesus and of Jesus's reply was added as evidence, translated into Greek from the Syriac originals which, Eusebius asserts, were preserved in the archives of Edessa (Brock 1992). This legend must have been created around, or shortly before, 300 by one group of Edessene Christians wanting to boost their position, using the most powerful tools: Jesus's authorship of the letter, the mission of one of the seventy apostles, the prestige of the royal house (which most likely never was Christian), and the renown of the Aramaic language. The legend was expanded in the early fifth-century Teaching of Addai and became very popular throughout the Christian world (Griffith 2003). Its notable absence from some important Syriac sources, including Ephrem, may indicate that it was not universally endorsed or given credence by fourth-century Syriac Christians. Eusebius certainly contributed to granting Syriac Christianity its rightful—albeit somewhat peripheral—place within Christianity as it developed in the Roman end p.371

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Empire. The position of Syriac Christian communities outside the Roman Empire, especially those living under the Sasanid Persians, Rome's eternal enemies, was more problematic. In northern Mesopotamia, the frontier between the Roman and Persian Empires became a real dividing line between the Christian and Zoroastrian worlds, cutting across the homelands of the Aramaic-speaking population. Syriac Christians were a minority in the Zoroastrian state. In times of peace, they enjoyed freedom and some sort of official protection. In times of war with the Roman neighbours, however, their position was vulnerable, and persecution occurred regularly (Rist 1996).

18.4 Aphrahat and Ephrem Two of the most important Syriac authors, Aphrahat and Ephrem, lived in the

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fourth century. Together they are the most eloquent and distinctive spokespersons of Syriac Christianity, on the two sides of the Roman-Persian frontier.13 Aphrahat's modest literary corpus consists of twenty-three Demonstrations, or treatises, written in epistolary form and dated to the years 337–45. Ephrem worked in Nisibis until 363, when, following Julian's death, the Romans surrendered the city to the Persians, and many Christians, Ephrem among them, moved westwards to Edessa. He lived the last 10 years of his life in that city, where he died in 373. Ephrem's œuvre is much more voluminous than that of Aphrahat and includes biblical commentaries, prose treatises, and above all poetical compositions. In spite of the geographical distance and the different political worlds in which they operated, Aphrahat and Ephrem had a great deal in common. Heirs to the Aramaic cultural heritage of Mesopotamia, they expressed themselves in a high form of literary Syriac, of which both were skilled masters. While the Old Testament occupies a prominent place in their thought (Van Rompay 1996: 619–28), their theological views and expressions show some marked differences. Ephrem wholeheartedly espoused Nicene Christianity, of which he became a staunch defender (Griffith 1986). Aphrahat, on the other hand, does not betray any knowledge of the Nicene Creed and exhibits a theology which in both its Trinitarian and its Christological concepts is unique.14 Ephrem fully believed in the Christian Empire under the protection of the God-appointed emperor Constantine and his successors (he saw Julian's short-lived reign in the 360s as a lamentable intermezzo). Aphrahat's position is much more complicated. Viewing contemporary history through the lens of Daniel's prophetic visions, he awaits the eschatological kingdom of Christ. The Roman Empire for him is the fourth kingdom, represented by the fourth beast, which is ‘dreadful, mighty, and exceedingly strong’ (Dan 7: 7; Dem. 5. 19).15 It will be killed at the inauguration end p.372

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved of the eternal kingdom, and its body will perish, but until then it will last. The Persians, symbolized by the ram (Dan 8: 4–8), therefore, will not prevail against it. This interpretation does not imply Aphrahat's full sympathy with the Roman Christian Empire, but the Empire does have a clear place in his view of history, a place not challenged by Persian aggression. While Ephrem often polemicizes against perceived enemies of Christianity, open polemic is much rarer in Aphrahat. Ephrem focuses his invective on the Marcionites, the followers of Bardaisan, and the Manichaeans. Each of these groups, which Ephrem sees as genealogically related, must have held their appeal for many Christians in northern Mesopotamia. Aphrahat, on the other hand, occasionally refers to Marcion and Mani, but never mentions Bardaisan. A further distinction is Ephrem's rebuttal of Arius and Arianism, which has no parallel in Aphrahat, who, as we have seen, had no part in the discussions surrounding Nicaea. An area in which Aphrahat and Ephrem have similarities while also being clearly distinctive is their attitude towards Judaism. Both authors are familiar with Jewish traditions, Jewish interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, and Jewish hermeneutical principles. The ease and frequency with which they incorporate such interpretations and motifs in their work is very revealing, not only about their own intellectual background, but also about that of their audiences. While some of this shared heritage may have entered Syriac Christianity along with the Old Testament Peshitta, other elements seem to reflect later contacts, or even to respond to contemporary discussions.16 We must conclude, therefore, that in fourth-century central Mesopotamia, as well as in Nisibis and Edessa, there was still a shared discourse connecting Judaism and Syriac Christianity.

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In spite of this obvious proximity (or, should one say, because of it?), there is also strong antagonism toward Judaism. Ephrem, following the rhetorical lead of the Hebrew Bible prophets, speaks extremely negatively not only about the Israel of the Old Testament, but also about contemporary Judaism. Aphrahat, while sharing several of the themes of Christian anti-Jewish literature of his day, is much more restrained in his critique, and tries to persuade his alleged Jewish interlocutor with arguments taken primarily from the Old Testament, searching for Old Testament precedents—not just types—for the main tenets of Christianity. Much work has been done in the past decades both on the parallels that Aphrahat and Ephrem share with Jewish tradition and on their anti-Judaism.17 How exactly these two aspects should be brought together is not yet clear. To what extent does the anti-Jewish discourse reflect the historical realities in the Persian and the Roman Empires? Why is the anti-Jewish rhetoric of these two Syriac authors, who speak with voices so distinct from those of western Christianity, often so similar to the anti-Judaism of western church fathers? The writings of Aphrahat and Ephrem, created in central Mesopotamia under Persian rule and in north Mesopotamia under Roman rule, display the essential end p.373

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved unity of Syriac literary tradition in the fourth century. There is, however, very little evidence of direct links between the two literary corpora.18 It is only a hundred years after Ephrem's death that we know for sure that Aphrahat's work circulated in Edessa, Ephrem's second home town, when the scribe of what is now the first part of London, British Library, Add. MS 17, 182 (fos. 1–99) copied the first ten of the Demonstrations, in Edessa, in September 474 (Wright 1871: 403a–404a). Aphrahat and Ephrem have received more attention from Syriac scholars than any other authors. In the past decades, many of their works, critically edited from manuscripts as early as the fifth and sixth centuries, have become available in modern translations. Both the literary qualities and the symbolic theology of their works have been explored.19 Although both authors are still seen as having been affected only a little by Greek philosophical and theological thinking, in an important recent publication (1999) Ute Possekel has convincingly shown Ephrem's familiarity with the Greek philosophical concepts of his day.

18.5 The Beginnings of Syriac Ascetic Literature Aphrahat and Ephrem, ascetics themselves, are important witnesses to the concepts and institutions of fourth-century Syriac asceticism. Particularly intriguing, and much studied, is the institution of the bnay/bn t qy m , usually translated as ‘sons/daughters of the covenant’.20 Standing between the clergy and the lay people, these ascetics had a specific role within the community at large. Aphrahat's and Ephrem's works are aimed not at a separate body of ascetics, but at the broader Christian community. The idea of ascetic withdrawal from society seems first to appear in the Syrian area around the middle of the fourth century (Griffith 1994), and it is around 400 that we first hear about communities of ascetics deliberately conceived as distinct from lay society. The Book of Steps (Liber graduum) is a collection of thirty treatises addressed to a Christian community in which ordinary Christians (called ‘the Upright’) lived side by side with ‘the Perfect’. The Perfect were enjoined to keep the ‘major commandments’ of radical asceticism, which included rejection of possessions, marriage, and manual labour, as well as total ‘self-emptying’ (cf. Phil 2: 7), while the ‘minor commandments’ were assigned to the Upright, who in addition were

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expected to provide for the Perfect (Kitchen and Parmentier 2004). Geographically, the Book of Steps belongs to the Persian part of northern Mesopotamia, probably to the region known as Adiabene. The spiritual instructions that the Book imparts are put into the mouth of an end p.374

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved anonymous visionary leader, whom the alleged editor of the work (who may or may not be the real author) introduces as ‘one of the first teachers who wrote in Syriac’ and as the peer of fathers like ‘Gregory the Great (i.e. of Nazianzus), Basil the Great, and blessed Evagrius’ (Syriac Editor's Preface). The radical asceticism of the Perfect seems to echo the rigorous practices advocated by Tatian and in the Acts of Thomas, while there are also intriguing parallels with the Greek homilies attributed to Macarius as well as with Manichaean asceticism (Caner 2002). Perhaps a decade or two after the Book of Steps, a different voice of Syriac asceticism expressed itself in the works of John the Solitary (Lavenant 1984). He lived near Apamea, in Syria Secunda (an important centre of Middle Platonist and Neoplatonist philosophy), and was among the first Syriac authors working that far west of the Euphrates (Brock 1998b: 715). John's focus was not community life, but the individual ascetic's spiritual progress, which he analysed in philosophical and psychological terms. There is general agreement nowadays that John originally wrote in Syriac. His familiarity with Greek philosophy certainly did not place him outside the mainstream tradition of Syriac asceticism, which he marked profoundly with his imprint. Prior to the popularity in Syriac of writings associated with Egyptian asceticism, such as the corpus attributed to Evagrius Ponticus (which became available in Syriac no later than c. 500), the Book of Steps and John the Solitary's œuvre indicate that the early fifth century was an important period in the formative process of Syriac Christianity. The significance of this period is marked in other ways as well.

18.6 The Early Fifth Century and the Increasing Hellenization of Syriac Christianity An important manuscript was completed at Edessa in November 411. It survived and is actually the earliest dated Syriac manuscript: London, British Library, Add. Ms 12, 150 (Wright 1871: 631a–633b). It contains the following texts: (1) selections from the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions; (2) Titus of Bostra's work against the Manichaeans; (3) Eusebius of Caesarea's Theophany; (4) Eusebius's On the Martyrs of Palestine; (5) Eusebius's Praise of the Martyrs; (6) a martyrology, arranged according to the Syriac months, with the names of martyrs in Persia added at the end (unfortunately damaged and incomplete). end p.375

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Texts 1–5 are translations from Greek. Eusebius's earlier interest in things Edessene seems to be reciprocated here with a full Syriac translation of three of his works (one of them, the Theophany, is not otherwise preserved). The Recognitions, exhibiting traces of a more Jewish type of Christianity, probably originated in Greek in fourth-century Syria (Jones 1995, 2003), while Titus's

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work, only partly preserved in Greek, was one of the most systematic refutations of Manichaeism—written around 370 by the bishop of Bostra in Arabia (Pedersen 2004). These major Greek works, products of the neighbouring provinces of Syria, Palaestina, and Arabia, must have been deliberately incorporated in the literary tradition of Edessene Christianity, which was in the process of redefining its place within imperial Christianity. At the same time, there was a sense of attachment to Syriac Christians in Persia, indicated by the inclusion of their martyrs in the manuscript. Contacts with Persian Christians became more frequent, as the local Synod of Seleucia-Ctesiphon of 410, held under the auspices of the Persian Emperor, declared Christianity in Persia in agreement with the church of the Roman Empire. Among the protagonists of the synod was Maruta, bishop of Mayperqat (Martyropolis), who travelled back and forth as an envoy between the two empires (Winkler 2003: 25–8, 55–8). The relief in the situation of the Christians of Persia, which was inaugurated by the 410 synod, was only temporary, for by the year 419 political tension with the Roman Empire increased, and persecution resumed (Van Rompay 1995; Rist 1996: 31–3).

18.7 The Fifth-Century Christological Discussions and their Aftermath Developments in Edessa were marked decisively by the long tenure of the energetic Bishop Rabbula (411/12–435). Rules for monks, priests, and bnay and bn t qy m , which he issued, show him as a committed organizer, keen to increase discipline and to regulate religious life. There is also evidence that he energetically set up programmes for the poor and the sick (Harvey 1994; Drijvers 1996),21 while his dealings with pagans, heretics, and Jews (many of whom he allegedly succeeded in converting) have been variously interpreted. He promoted the use of the four separate Gospels, over against the Diatessaron (Petersen 1994: 42–3), and it is generally agreed that he had some involvement in the standardization of the New Testament text, although his exact role in creating and introducing the New Testament Peshitta remains debated. During Rabbula's tenure, theological conflict broke out between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius of Constantinople, leading to the condemnation of Nestorius end p.376

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved at the Council of Ephesus (431). Rabbula eventually became a staunch defender of Cyril's Christology. Whether he turned to it for political reasons, or whether this was his deepest conviction from the outset, will always remain a mystery.22 In the campaign that Rabbula subsequently launched against the opponents of Alexandrian Christology, it was not so much Nestorius who was the target, but Theodore of Mopsuestia, who had died in peace in 428 and was now branded as one of the initiators of Nestorius's two-nature Christology. Many of Theodore's Greek works at this point already existed in Syriac translations and enjoyed great popularity in the School of Edessa, an academic institution with connections to the ecclesiastical authorities. By linking Theodore's name to the struggle against Nestorianism and by condemning Theodore's works to be burnt in Edessa (432), Rabbula contributed to dividing Edessene and Syriac Christianity into two opposing camps, which would never again be reconciled. At the same time, Syriac Christianity was thrown into the midst of the Christological controversy that pervaded the imperial church for more than a century and led up to the ecumenical councils of Chalcedon (451) and Constantinople (553). Many in Edessa remained faithful to Theodore's legacy, to his Christology and

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biblical interpretation. While they continued studying his works and reinterpreting them in Syriac, they succeeded in creating a synthesis between the new Antiochene theology and the earlier Syriac tradition. One of the promoters of this process of adaptation and transformation of Theodore's works was Narsai, a gifted poet from Persian Mesopotamia. As a student at the School of Edessa and later, from the middle of the fifth century, as the school's director, he expressed the Antiochene views on Christ, human history, and salvation in metrical homilies, the language and style of which are often reminiscent of the earlier Syriac literary tradition. Just as in his exposition of the two-nature Christology Narsai emphasized Christ's full humanity (Frishman 1995–6), so too in his biblical interpretation he highlighted the human measure of God's dealings with man throughout history. The story of Paradise, for example, was seen not as the account of man's revolt and rejection that for ever changed human nature, but as the first step in the learning process through which God, according to his plan, led man to perfection (Frishman 1997; Becker 2006: 98–125). This Antiochene, Theodorean line of thought met with increasing opposition in Edessa, so that, somewhere in the second half of the fifth century, Narsai, along with his followers and his books, left the city and established a new school in the city of Nisibis, which was within Persian territory. Narsai was the director of this new school until his death in 502/3. The School of Nisibis quickly became the intellectual centre of Persian Christianity, which adopted Theodore's two-nature Christology as its official doctrine at synods held in 484 and 486 (Winkler 2003: 66–9; Becker 2006). The East Syriac church, which is often infelicitously and incorrectly called ‘Nestorian’ (whereas its theology is in fact much closer to Theodore than to Nestorius), was henceforth seen as heretical by the imperial church. end p.377

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Those in Edessa and elsewhere in Syria, who did not identify with Antiochene theology and exegesis as interpreted by Theodore of Mopsuestia, instead embraced Cyril of Alexandria's concepts and thoughts. Rabbula himself was one of the first interpreters of Cyril in Syriac. A process parallel to what happened to Theodore took place with regard to Cyril and Alexandrian theology. One of its main representatives in the late fifth and early sixth century was Jacob of Serug, who, just like Narsai, though probably slightly later than him, had been a student at the School of Edessa. In contrast with Narsai, he belonged to those in the school who opposed Theodore's influence.23 The demise of Antiochene theology within the Roman Empire and the exodus from Edessa to Nisibis did not imply that the Cyrillian opponents, who followed in the footsteps of Rabbula and Jacob of Serug, emerged as the winners. For 20 years after Ephesus, at the Council of Chalcedon (451), the imperial church endorsed a moderate form of the two-nature Christology. Intent on steering a middle course, the Council of Chalcedon condemned at the same time (what it saw as) extreme Dyophysitism, which was associated with the name of Nestorius, and Monophysitism, which was associated with the name of Eutyches. Chalcedon's sanctioning of the two-nature Christology, which became the doctrinal foundation for the whole of western Christianity, however, was unacceptable to many Christians, even those who were not willing to follow Eutyches (according to whom Christ's human nature was entirely absorbed within, and thus erased by, his divinity). Many Christians in Syria and Mesopotamia—as well as in Egypt, and later in Armenia and Ethiopia—thought that God-becoming-man could not exist in two natures, but had to be envisioned in one new nature of the God-man Christ. This was not, in their view, a particular expression of their type of eastern Christianity; rather, they were fully convinced that Miaphysitism, the one-nature doctrine,24 was fully consonant with the

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teaching of the earlier orthodox church fathers, including Athanasius of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, Cyril, and all those who were universally recognized as the pillars of (imperial) orthodoxy. It is in this spirit that the main theologians of the Miaphysite tradition, Philoxenus of Mabbog in Syriac and Severus of Antioch in Greek, defended the orthodoxy of their views. In the late fifth and early sixth century, they had the emperors' ears and occasionally their support, especially between 512 and 518, when Severus occupied the patriarchate of Antioch. In those years, Miaphysitism held sway all over the eastern empire, in Antioch, Alexandria, and even in Constantinople, while with Rome a schism existed between 482 and 518. At the accession of Justin I, in 518, however, Chalcedonian orthodoxy was restored as the basis of the Empire's religious policy. Severus was deposed and fled to Egypt, while the Miaphysites became the target of the emperors' assiduous attempts to bring them back to normative Chalcedonianism, either by persuasion or by force (Van Rompay 2005). end p.378

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18.8 A Scattered Legacy and a Divided Tradition: The Sixth Century and Beyond These attempts failed. Instead, anti-Chalcedonians within the Roman Empire gradually shaped their own identity and their own ecclesiastical structures. Towards the end of the sixth century, the resistance against the imperial Church —which the Miaphysites saw as heretical—expressed itself predominantly in Syriac (mirroring the role of Coptic in the same period in Egypt), and the foundations were laid for a self-conscious, anti-Chalcedonian, Syrian Orthodox community. The sixth century in many ways was a very creative period. Earlier works by Ephrem and others were copied, while new texts—theological, hagiographical, historical, and philosophical—were authored. Churches and monasteries were built or expanded (Van Rompay 2005: 256–7). In the same period, Dyophysite Christianity had its formative period in the Persian-Sasanid Empire (Reinink 1995). These two Syriac churches were further consolidated under Islamic rule, while Syriac Christians of Chalcedonian allegiance found their way either into the Maronite Church, with its original centre in the region of Apamea, or into the Melkite (i.e. Byzantine Orthodox) Church of the patriarchate of Antioch. Each of these traditions in its own way continues to the present day the religious and cultural heritage of Syriac Christianity. The Greek interpretation of Christianity in the course of history may have left a strong imprint on Syriac Christianity, even transforming it in a number of ways. Yet the historian should not see these developments as a move away from the early indigenous roots of Syriac Christian culture. Each period should be studied in its own right, with its own historical and cultural complexities, as an authentic expression of Syriac Christianity. Notes 1.

For surveys of Syriac scholarship, see Brock (1994); De Halleux (1996); Murray (2004: 1–38). 2. With the exception of the surroundings of Jerusalem and some areas in Palestine, where there was a modest development of a different, West-Aramaic literary language, i.e. Christian Palestinian Aramaic. 3. Examples are the use of ‘distancing’ techniques when God is addressed or spoken about (in an attempt to emphasize God's transcendence); the introduction of prayer language where this is absent from the biblical text; the

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use of the term ‘Shekintâ’, denoting the Divine Presence. See Brock (1995b, 1998a: 489–93). 4. This may refer to any place in Syria or Mesopotamia, see Millar (1993: 227); contra Hunt (2003: 181 n. 1). end p.379

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A critical survey of scholarship on the Diatessaron is available in Petersen (1994). 6. The term enkrateia is used here in its general sense, rather than as the specific designation of a sect, constructed by later heresiologists; see Hunt (2003: 145–50). 7. For a cautious and methodologically important study of some terms related to the incarnation, each having its own Jewish-Aramaic background, see Brock (1989); see also Brock (2001: 388 and 391–5). 8. Murray (2004) and Drijvers (1984) should be singled out among the scholars who have been most successful in depicting coherent pictures of pre-fourthcentury Syriac Christianity. 9. For scholarship on the Hymn of the Pearl, see Poirier (1981) and Ferreira (2002). 10. For the state of the research, see Uro (2003: esp. 26–30 and 134–8). According to Uro, ‘it has been almost universally acknowledged that [the Gospel of] Thomas should be seen as a product of east Syrian Christianity’ (p. 137). He regards the period between c. 100 and 140 CE as ‘the best conjecture’ for the date. DeConick (2005) suggests a mid-first-century origin for the ‘kernel’ text in a Palestinian-Aramaic context, while the complete Gospel, to be dated no later than 120 CE, might reflect adaptation and modification in Syriac (esp. pp. 240–4). Quispel (2006), agreeing with DeConick, asserts that the Gospel of Thomas was written in Edessa before 140 CE. 11. The most accessible English translation is Drijvers (1965). For a recent German translation, with some notes, see Krannich and Stein (2004). A recent analysis of Bardaisan's view on the resurrection can be found in Possekel (2004). 12. Another categorization which is not helpful in the study of early Syriac Christianity is that of Gnosticism. While some texts have been understood as Gnostic by ancient readers or by modern scholars, the distinction makes sense only from the perspective of a (later) non-Gnostic orthodox standard. Attempts to group together certain Gnostic texts of alleged Syrian origin have remained problematic. See King (2003: 162–5) and Uro (2003: 20–4). 13. Introductions to Ephrem's world and writings can be found in McVey (1989) and Brock (1990); for Aphrahat, see Baarda (1975: 1–10); Pierre (1988); Bruns (1990, 1991). 14. An excellent treatment of Aphrahat's Christology is Bruns (1990). On the possible connection between this Christology and Jewish Christianity, see the author's nuanced observations on pp. 214–16. 15. References are to Valavanolickal (2005). 16. For Ephrem, see Kronholm (1978); for Aphrahat, see Koltun-Fromm (1996). 17. For Ephrem, see Shepardson (2001) and Kuhlmann (2004); for Aphrahat, see Becker (2002, 2003). 18. Brock (1995a: 77) identified a passage in Ephrem's Commentary on the Diatessaron that mirrors, and may have been borrowed from, Aphrahat's Demonstration 23. 19. Murray (2004) focuses on Aphrahat and Ephrem while taking other early texts into consideration as well. On Ephrem, see also Bou Mansour (1988). For an exploration of Ephrem's poetic language and style within the broader Aramaic literary tradition, see Rodrigues Pereira (1997).

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20.

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Griffith (1995: 229–34). For a possible connection between the qy m and

the Jewish institution of the macamad, see Pierre (1988: 99 n. 84); de Halleux (1996: 161 with n. 78); Murray (2004: 14 n. 65). For further possible layers of meaning, see Murray (1999, 2004: 16–17). For a recent study on the bn t qy m , see Harvey (2005). end p.380

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Doran (2006) conveniently brings together English translations of the most relevant Syriac texts, with introductions and notes. 22. For a recent discussion of some of the theological implications of Rabbula's position, see Doran (2006: 61–4), while the possible social dimension of the conflict in Edessa is indicated (pp. 115–19). 23. On Jacob's Christology, see Bou Mansour (2002). The parallelism between Jacob and Narsai may not be complete, as Jacob does not seem not to have followed Cyril as radically as Narsai followed Theodore. Both in his theology and in his biblical interpretation Jacob was closer to Ephrem than was Narsai. See Bou Mansour (2002: 497–9); Van Rompay (1996: 637–9). 24. There is a tendency in recent scholarship to use the term ‘Miaphysite’, which reflects Cyril of Alexandria's Christological terminology, and to avoid other terms that in the past were used to designate the anti-Chalcedonians, such as ‘Monophysite’ and ‘Jacobite’. The latter names, coined by the anti-Chalcedonians' opponents, are seen by the present-day non-Chalcedonian communities as inadequate descriptions of their tradition. The term ‘Monophysite’ is associated with Eutyches, whose Christology is rejected by all later Miaphysite theologians. Suggested Reading Many of the works referred to in the Bibliography will serve as introductions to important themes and as stepping stones towards further explorations and research. The following titles are additional.

Atallah, M. et al. (2005) (eds.), Sources syriaques, i: Nos sources: Arts et littérature syriaques (Antélias: Centre d'Études et de Recherches Orientales).

BROCK, S. (1997), A Brief Outline of Syriac Literature, Moran 'Etho, 9 (Baker Hill, Kottayam: St Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute). —— and HARVEY , S. A. (1987), Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 13 (Berkeley: University of California Press). CAMPLANI, A. (1998), ‘Rivisitando Bardesane: Note sulle fonti siriache del bardesanismo e sulla sua collocazione storico-religiosa’, Cristianesimo nella Storia, 19: 519–96. —— (2005), ‘Bardesane et les bardesanites’, Annuaire de l'École pratique des hautes études: Section des sciences religieuses: Résumé des conférences et travaux 112: 29–50. DONCEEL-VOÛTE, P. (1988), Les pavements des églises byzantines de Syrie et du Liban: Décor, archéologie et liturgie, Publications d'histoire de l'art et

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d'archéologie de l'Université de Louvain, 69 (Louvain-la-Neuve: Département d'archéologie et d'histoire de l'art). GARSOÏAN, N., MATHEWS, T., and THOMSON R. W. (1982) (eds.), East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks).

HARVEY , S. A. (1990), Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 18 (Berkeley: University of California Press). ROSS, S. K. (2001), Roman Edessa: Politics and Culture on the Eastern Fringes of the Roman Empire, 114–242 CE (London: Routledge). end p.381

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved WALKER, J. T. (2006), The Legend of Mar Qardagh: Narrative and Christian Heroism in Late Antique Iraq, Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 40 (Berkeley: University of California Press). Bibliography

BAARDA, T. (1975), The Gospel Quotations of Aphrahat the Persian Sage, i: Aphrahat's Text of the Fourth Gospel (Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). BECKER, A. H. (2002), ‘Anti-Judaism and Care for the Poor in Aphrahat's Demonstration 20’, JECS 10: 305–27. —— (2003), ‘Beyond the Spatial and Temporal Limes: Questioning the “Parting of the Ways” Outside the Roman Empire’, in A. H. Becker and A. Y. Reed (eds.), The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum, 95 (Tübingen: Mohr/Paul Siebeck), 373–92. —— (2006), Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and Christian Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

BEYER, K. (1991), ‘Das syrische Perlenlied: ein Erlösungsmythos als Märchengedicht’, ZDMG 140: 234–59. BOU MANSOUR, T. (1988), La pensée symbolique de Saint Éphrem le Syrien, Bibliothèque de l'Université Saint Esprit, 16 (Kaslik: Université Saint-Esprit).

—— (2002), ‘Die Christologie des Jakob von Sarug’, in A. Grillmeier (ed.), Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche, Band 2/3: Die Kirchen von Jerusalem und

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Antiochien nach 451 bis 600, mit Beiträgen von A. Grillmeier, Th. Hainthaler, T. Bou Mansour, L. Abramowski, herausgegeben von Th. Hainthaler (Freiburg: Herder), 449–99. BROCK, S. (1989), ‘The Lost Old Syriac at Luke 1:35 and the Earliest Syriac Terms for the Incarnation’, in W. L. Petersen (ed.), Gospel Traditions in the Second Century: Origins, Recensions, Text, and Transmission, Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity, 3 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press), 117–31.

—— (1990), Saint Ephrem: Hymns on Paradise (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press). —— (1992), ‘Eusebius and Syriac Christianity’, in H. W. Attridge and G. Hata (eds.), Eusebius, Christianity, and Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 212–34. —— (1994), ‘Syriac Studies in the Last Three Decades’, in R. Lavenant (ed.), VI Symposium Syriacum 1992, OrChrAn 247 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum), 13–29. —— (1995a), ‘Notulae Syriacae: Some Miscellaneous Identifications’, Mus 108: 69–78. —— (1995b), ‘A Palestinian Targum Feature in Syriac’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 46: 271–82. —— (1998a), ‘The Peshitta Old Testament: Between Judaism and Christianity’, Cristianesimo nella Storia, 19: 483–502. end p.382

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved —— (1998b), ‘Syriac Culture, 337–425’, in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey (eds.), CAH Ancient History, xiii: The Late Empire, A.D. 337–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 708–19. BROCK, S. (2001), ‘Invocations to/for the Holy Spirit in Syriac Liturgical Texts: Some Comparative Approaches’, in R. F. Taft and G. Winkler (eds.), Comparative Liturgy Fifty Years after Anton Baumstark (1872–1948), OrChrAn 265 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum), 377–406. BRUNS, P. (1990), Das Christusbild Aphrahats des Persischen Weisen, Hereditas: Studien zur Alten Kirchengeschichte, 4 (Bonn: Borengässer). —— (1991), Aphrahat: Unterweisungen, Fontes Christiani, 5/1–2 (Freiburg: Herder). CANER, D. (2002), Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the

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Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 33 (Berkeley: University of California Press). CHARLESWORTH, J. H. (1998), Critical Reflections on the Odes of Solomon, i: Literary Setting, Textual Studies, Gnosticism, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gospel of John, JSPSup 22 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). DECONICK, A. D. (2005), Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas: A History of the Gospel and its Growth, Early Christianity in Context—Library of New Testament Studies, 286 (London: T & T Clark). DORAN, R. (2006), Stewards of the Poor: The Man of God, Rabbula, and Hiba in Fifth-Century Edessa, CS 208 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications).

DRIJVERS, H. J. W. (1965), The Book of the Laws of Countries: Dialogue on Fate of Bardaisan of Edessa, Semitic Texts with Translations (Assen: Van Gorcum).

—— (1984), ‘East of Antioch: Forces and Structures in the Development of Early Syriac Theology’, in H. J. W. Drijvers, East of Antioch: Studies in Early Syriac Christianity (London: Variorum Reprints), 1–27. —— (1992), ‘The Acts of Thomas’, in W. Schneemelcher (ed.), New Testament Apocrypha, rev. ed., ii.: Writings Relating to the Apostles: Apocalypses and Related Subjects (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press), 322–411.

—— (1996), ‘The Man of God of Edessa, Bishop Rabbula, and the Urban Poor: Church and Society in the Fifth Century’, JECS 4: 235–48. —— and HEALEY , J. F. (1999), The Old Syriac Inscriptions of Edessa and Osrhoene, Handbuch der Orientalistik, i, 42 (Leiden: E. J. Brill). FERREIRA, J. (2002), The Hymn of the Pearl: The Syriac and Greek Texts with Introduction, Translations, and Notes, Early Christian Studies, 3 (Sydney: St Paul's Publications). FRISHMAN, J. (1995–6), ‘Narsai's Christology according to his Homily “On the Word Became Flesh”,’, The Harp: A Review of Syriac and Oriental Ecumenical Studies, 8–9: 289–303. —— (1997), ‘Themes on Genesis 1–5 in Early East-Syrian Exegesis’, in J. Frishman and L. Van Rompay (eds.), The Book of Genesis in Jewish and Oriental Christian Interpretation: A Collection of Essays, Traditio Exegetica Graeca, 5 (Louvain: Peeters), 171–86. GRIFFITH, S. H. (1986), ‘Ephraem, the Deacon of Edessa, and the Church of the Empire’, in Th. Halton and J. P. Williman (eds.), Diakonia: Studies in Honor of Robert T. Meyer (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press), 22–52.

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—— (1994), ‘Julian Saba, “Father of the Monks” of Syria’, JECS 2: 185–216.

—— (1995), ‘Asceticism in the Church of Syria: The Hermeneutics of Early Syrian Monasticism’, in V. L. Wimbush and R. Valantasis (eds.), Asceticism (New York: Oxford University Press), 220–45. —— (2003), ‘The Doctrina Addai as a Paradigm of Christian Thought in Edessa in the Fifth Century’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, , 6/2. end p.383

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) © Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved HAAR ROMENY , B. ter (2005), ‘Hypotheses on the Development of Judaism and Christianity in Syria in the Period after 70 C.E.’, in H. van de Sandt (ed.), Matthew and the Didache: Two Documents from the Same Jewish-Christian Milieu? (Assen: Van Gorcum; Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 13–33.

HALLEUX, A. de (1996), ‘Vingt ans d'étude critique des Églises syriaques’, in R. F. Taft (ed.), The Christian East: Its Institutions and Its Thoughts: A Critical Reflection, OrChrAn 252 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum), 145–79. HARVEY , S. A. (1994), ‘The Holy and the Poor: Models from Early Syriac Christianity’, in E. A. Hanawalt and C. Lindberg (eds.), ‘Through the Eye of the Needle’: Judeo-Christian Roots of Social Welfare (Kirksville, Mo.: The Thomas Jefferson University Press), 43–66. —— (2005), ‘Revisiting the Daughters of the Covenant: Women's Choirs and Sacred Song in Ancient Syriac Christianity’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, , 8/2. HUNT, E. J. (2003), Christianity in the Second Century: The Case of Tatian (London: Routledge). JONES, F. S. (1995), An Ancient Jewish Christian Source on the History of Christianity: Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1, 27–71, SBLTT, Christian Apocrypha Series, 37/2 (Atlanta: Scholars Press). —— (2003), ‘Clement of Rome and the Pseudo-Clementines: History and/or Fiction’, in Ph. Luisier (ed.), Studi su Clemente Romano, OrChrAn 268 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum), 139–61. JOOSTEN, J. (1997), ‘La tradition syriaque des évangiles et la question du ’, Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 77: 257–72. KING, K. L. (2003), What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

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KITCHEN, R. A., and PARMENTIER, M. F. G. (2004), The Book of Steps: The Syriac Liber Graduum, CS 196 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications).

KOLTUN-FROMM, N. (1996), ‘A Jewish-Christian Conversation in Fourth-Century Persian Me